Abuja – Director-General of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Mr. Chris Onyemenam, says effective identification system will assist security agencies in the country in combating crime.

Onyemenam on Sunday in Abuja said that the new system the commission was putting in place would provide needed infrastructure for the identification of any individual in any circumstance.

The director-general said one of the responsibilities of the NIMC was to provide infrastructure to enable an individual or organisation get valid and reliable information on the identity of any person.

“It (effective identification system) will be certainly be useful to the law enforcement agencies from the police to the intelligence community, the security agencies at large because at the, the common denominator is who are you, put differently, are you who you say you are.

“If you want to confirm some persons, our own responsibility is to provide an infrastructure that enables you within seconds of a request to obtain valid and reliable response as to the identity of the person that you have asked a confirmation for.’’

Onyemenam said the system would enable security agencies to easily track down people with fingerprints that could be easily matched when crimes were committed.

He also said that in addition to doing this, the nation would be in a position to identify all its citizens as that should be one of the primary focuses of the scheme.

He expressed the hope that the new national identity card that would be issued by the commission would in no distant time serve as travel document for Nigerians, at least within the ECOWAS sub-region.

“There will come a time when your national identity card will become a travel document even in the ECOWAS region. We have anticipated already what will happen in the not too distant future. It is already the rule in Europe.’’

On how the proposed new identity scheme would help in identifying illegal immigrants in the country, Onyemenam said once there was a system to assert the identity of citizens; it would also be easy identify foreigners impersonating Nigerians.

“As you introduce measures and processes for ensuring that citizens are legal residents and are able to assert their identities, you discover that over time, it will become a lot easier to stop non-Nigerians from claiming to be Nigerians.’’

On what the country had lost for not having credible identification system, he explained the non- availability of a veritable identification scheme was an inhibiting factor in business and other transactional relationships between people.

Onyemenam said that one way of explaining the loss was the damage done by fraudsters otherwise known as 419ers to the image of the country and its national pride.

“One good way of explaining what we have lost as a nation by the absence of a core identity management infrastructure is to just reflect on the damage done by those we popularly refer to as 419 fraudsters and what they have done to our national pride and image, it’s been so bad.

“If you do not know who you are dealing with; that in itself is an inhibiting factor; it limits the extent to which you can go into transactional relationships; it means there is a limit to the kind of trust or business relations that you can go into.

“If you do not know your counterpart, you are not in a position to appreciate what you can benefit from the relationship.  If you don’t know your counterpart, it is even difficult to estimate his capacities.’’ (NAN)