By Adekunle Adekoya

FOR some time now, commercials have been running in the media announcing another innovation from the Nigeria Police, called Police BCMR, or Police Biometric Central Motor Registry.

This document, according to information from the Police BCMR portal (www.policebcmr.org) is a “technological means of attaching automobile owner’s special and unique biological characteristics (biometrics) and personal data to their vehicles for authentication, protection, crime prevention and control purposes which operates on a smart card and handheld card reader.

“This is also a specially developed enterprise solution for centralization and validation of vehicle documents in order to create and authenticate the database for police operational use and management nationwide.”

Further, the Police on this portal says, and demonstrates with photographs that handheld devices  will be used to access data on the BCMR card, which motorcyclists will obtain for N1,500 and motorists for N3,500.

There is a whole trainload of information justifying the need for Nigerian motorist to have this document, with which I agree, but I believe other considerations should have been factored before going public with it.

The first is that it adds enormously to the amount of money an average motorist needs to cough out before he can legally drive a vehicle here. As things stand now, and this is verifiable, registration charges for new vehicles begins from N35,000 in Lagos, while renewals are in the neighbourhood of N10,000. If you add N3,500 for BCMR, the amount goes higher.

In short, the tax burden on people in this country is being increased by various agencies of government under various guises. We are all Nigerians, must we kill ourselves in the bid to create a good society?

The second is that this initiative should have awaited completion of both the National SIM Card Registration exercise and the harmonisation of other identity databases by the National Identity Management Commission. I think a harmonised identity database will be more useful to the Police than what we have currently, and this BCMR certainly can wait for that.

Where we are, there already exists too many identity databases which are not accessible for proper use. Examples include the INEC Voters’Register, the National Drivers’ License database belonging to both the Motor Vehicle Administrations of the states and the Federal Road Safety Commission, as well as the Immigration Service’s passport database.

These are besides the various bank accounts records, JAMB, WAEC, the universities and polytechnics, and a legion of other organizations that issue identity cards to people who are part of their systems, and all of them are closed systems.

Then, I have this sneaky feeling that enforcement of compliance with the BCMR might operationally bring back the outlawed checkpoint system, which the ebullient IGP has assured us is gone for good. Apart from that, optionally, a vehicle owner can subscribe to the tracking system that is part of the BCMR features as a value-added service.

Good, but it will have the effect of making the Police compete with vehicle tracking firms. That will not be good for employment and the economy generally, since no tracking firm can ever hope to rival the Police in capacity. In this regard, the Police should only be a regulator, not a competitor with tracking firms.