By Benjamin Ahiaba

It is imperative that sooner or later, Nigeria must toe the path of development by moving away from the primitive, cash-propelled economy towards the cash-lite system like the developed nations of the world; thus the CBN’s policy that tumbled Nigeria in this direction is timely.

It is not the focus of this piece to dwell on all the benefits of the scheme but there is agreement that given the cost of managing cash, as well as the need to accelerate and embrace new technologies that would make life easier for the populace, it had become an inescapable option.

The CBN has listed major disadvantages of using physical cash. One that is experiential to the average Nigerian is the fact that deployment of physical cash encourages robberies and other cash-related crimes and possible financial loss in the case of fire and flooding incidents.

Use of cash the way we have known it in this country results in a lot of money outside the formal system, which limits effectiveness of monetary policy in managing inflation and encouraging economic growth. Sometimes it enables corruption, leakages and money laundering, amongst other cash-related fraudulent practices.

The cashless project does not envisage that those who keep their money outside the banks will not be involved.  Since all major transactions will eventually become cashless, it implies that even those who engage in any form of monetary transaction will be part of the scheme.

The crux of the matter, then, is that the cashless scheme envisages that every Nigerian, including the banked and the unbanked, will be involved. The imperative for this is a secure, robust and verifiable means of identification through a centralized data base. Where is the hope for such a centralized database that may also be utilized for citizen identity register and other economic programmes and actions?

If recent report that the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, had successfully uploaded more than 110,433,976 registrations from the scheme to its back-end facility is true, then this may arguably provide the nation with the highest and most credible biometric data ever collated in Nigeria.

With clear indications of multiple registrations, even if the commission’s efforts at cleaning and harmonizing the data yields figures close to 60 million authentic, verifiable registrations, it sure will still provide a big backbone for the cashless society envisaged in Nigeria.

If we consider that most people using mobile phones engage in monetary transactions, we may not need a soothsayer to predict that the figures will be a good representation of both the banked and the unbanked in Nigeria, and that they will invariably belong to the class of Nigerians who will play in the emerging cashless society. It is therefore predictable that the cashless Nigeria envisaged by the CBN would depend largely on data from registered SIMs as the most credible and verifiable proof for secure transactions.

It was therefore no surprise why the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah, said to the media that the commission has done a very complex job very well, even if yet uncompleted. Juwah’s assertions were not only pointed at the amount of data so far collated and stored, but with reference to the associated cost of the project.

With India as a comparative cost reference, Juwah had said the budget proposal for the project at N6.1 Billion, including the cost of building the backbone infrastructure, and cost of data collection  at N120 per registration is the cheapest so far in Nigeria, or anywhere in any part of the world.

If this is true, then the nation would owe the telecoms regulator a special commendation for bequeathing the first and most credible biometric data of the greatest number of its citizens available for citizen data register, and such other economic programmes like the cashless policy of the CBN, and above all, in responding to the request of the security apparatchik for Nigerians to help curb crimes using the pervasive mobile phone technology.

In reaching some conclusions about the costs and availability of the SIM card data, we need to locate the status of similar biometric registrations in Nigeria and the possibility of their availing the nation of the demands of a cashless Nigeria.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) secured an initial budget sum of N74.69 Billion for its targeted 70 million voters in 2010, and ended up with an additional budget of N6.6Billion with which it finally registered an estimated 73, 528,040.

Although this data may be very useful to INEC for managing its electoral activities, it may not be same for other uses. The process of data gathering for INEC registration needs to be subjected to serious fidelity check, more so because it is not centralized for the type of information desired for cashless society.

The National Identity Management Commission has secured budget approval in estimates of N40 Billion for citizenship identity management, which is commendable but given the fresh start that this agency needs to refocus after several years of waste and confusion created by its previous administrators, it has an uphill task.

Collection and managing biometric data of 167 million people, issuance of national identity cards and managing citizen data from birth to death, is simply a huge task which may well have been simplified with the availability of SIM card registration.

Several other government agencies like Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, Immigration, Police, have been engaged in nondescript biometric data collection for their specific uses, but the implementation processes have remained amorphous.

There is need, therefore, to begin to harmonize available registrations in the country in such a way as to provide a centralized data for the nation. The huge amount of money expended by INEC for voter registration in the past elections justifies the need to securely manage the data to make them as useful as the SIM Card registration.

This is the only way such data would be better applied for the need of the society. Other agencies of government engaged in biometric data gathering should also be streamlined for their usefulness and possibility of integration with existing data such as SIM card registration.

Ahiaba  is an Abuja-based Public Affairs Analyst.