Nigeria may be on its way to having a single harmonised database if the move by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in cooperation with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) is fully executed.
The telecom regulator, which, through the SIM card registration process, is repository of over data of over 140 million mobile subscriptions, has set the ball in motion to pass over to the identity card agency the data captured during the SIM registration, which had hitherto been held exclusively by the NCC.
The welcome development comes as the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, received in audience, the Director-General of NIMC, Engr. Aliyu Aziz when the latter paid him a courtesy visit. The SIM registration is an on-going process in so far as new SIMs are still being sold to willing and prospective subscribers.
The move also sings to the Federal Government of Nigeria’s effort to harmonise biometric data captured by different agencies, which will hopefully give the country a truly centralised and harmonised database.
Already Nigerians have cried themselves hoarse over innumerable biometric data capture exercises, ranging from the SIM registration to bank verification; from identity card registration and driver’s licence data capture to immigration registration for international passport issuance; the list is almost endless, with each agency of the federal government holding fast to the data it has obtained from Nigerians while the citizens have to go to each and every one of the these agencies for the same biometric data capture, a situation many rightly described as needless waste of time and resources while duplicating of data without a handshake.
Prof. Danbatta, speaking while receiving Engr. Aziz, at the NCC corporate headquarters in Abuja, said the decision to release the data was in line with similar Federal Government’s instruction to transfer validated data to the sister agency.
“I would like to pledge our commitment to this cooperation between the NIMC and the NCC to ensure that we have a secure, reliable database containing biometric information for all Nigerians, which will definitely augur well for the security of the country among other benefits,” he noted.
“So we are committed to this. We recognise the importance of this cooperation and I would like to stress the need to give it all the seriousness it deserves. I am happy that there’s a Memorandum of Understanding and there’s also a Federal Government’s directive, which would help in facilitating the data transfer,” Prof. Danbatta stated.
He directed the NCC to ensure that the data transferred to NIMC are fully backed up to avoid any hitches in future.
Responding to a question at the occasion, however, the NIMC boss who expressed delight at the cooperation between the two agencies said that the data transfer from NCC would also improve the on-going National Identification Number (NIN) exercise of NIMC.
He said NIMC would use the NCC’s data to assign NIM to Nigerians who were captured in the validated data received.