A PRIMARY reason for Nigeria’s severe underdevelopment is that our government officials thrive on lip service and public grandstanding over issues at the heart of service delivery.

This has bedevilled efforts to establish a reliable and accessible national identity central database. Throughout the Muhammadu Buhari regime, it was all lip service and little follow-up actions to implement. The former president was notorious for giving orders and failing to demonstrate executive capacity for their implementation.

As far back as August 10, 2015, Buhari gave orders for the harmonisation of Nigeria’s biometric identity databases. Consequently, the National Identity Management Commission, NIMC, and the Federal Roads Service Commission, FRSC, kickstarted a flurry of activities, apparently towards actualizing the scheme. 

After the public inauguration of the policy and flowery speeches, nothing else was heard about it.

Six years later in September 2021, Buhari again ordered all the identity collation agencies to ensure that a central biometric identity platform was established before he left office in 2023. 

As if to show his commitment to this project, Buhari had approved the celebration of a National Identity Day, NID, in 2018. Nothing came of it. It thus became one of the regime’s failures.

The Bola Tinubu regime has started all over again to crusade about the need to have a harmonised national biometric database. This time, it is the new Minister of the Interior, Bunmi Tunji-Ojo, who is bringing back the issue to the front row. We are hoping that this government will improve on Buhari’s poor performance and quickly procure a centralised database for Nigeria.

The importance of this cannot be overemphasised. In this digital age, spontaneous establishment of a person’s identity on demand is taken for granted in most countries. But in Nigeria, every government agency or public establishment wants to establish and maintain its own exclusive identity platform due primarily to corrupt intentions, inter-agency rivalries and power show.

Because of this loose arrangement, some of the noble intentions behind the establishment of the National Identification Number, NIN, by the NIMC, the Bank Verification Number, BVN, by the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, the Subscriber Identification Module, SIM, cards by the telecom service providers have failed to materialise.

Terrorists, bandits, violent herdsmen, kidnappers, scammers and other criminals still use their gadgets to operate freely and confidently. A harmonised biometric identity register will make it easy for anyone in the country to be identified in real time by any agency of government, public and private institutions for more efficient service delivery. 

It will greatly enhance our economic development, policy delivery, security operations and law enforcement. It will also enhance efforts to establish a genuine social register for welfare administration.

We hope the Tinubu regime will break the deadlock and unify the disparate identity platforms with a sense of priority.