No Investor/Country should take Nigeria serious!
How can a country claim to be ready for business or development and spend 40 years providing ID cards to 37 million Nigerians when it has taken India only 9 years to register 1.22 billion Indians?
No country should take Nigeria seriously when it comes to doing business here or expectations of development in the nearest foreseeable future. NONE! Because the leaders of any serious country ready for development will understand that the first step towards any meaningful policy or development program is identification of its citizens.
It is clear that Nigerian leaders have refused to understand the importance of this common-sensical step towards development since 1978. It is therefore unsurprising that Nigeria has continued down the path of poverty and every negative index about prosperity.
- There are more poor people in Nigeria today than anywhere in the world
- 201 children die before the age of 5 out of every 1000 children born.
- 13.2 million children who survived after the age of 5 are out of school. The number continues to increase
- 172 million Nigerians (95%) of Nigerians have no health insurance or are not covered by the NHIS
- At the rate at which we continue to give birth to babies (7 million babies per year) and this is according to the DG of the NIMC, these problems can only be expected to become more wicked.
For a very big country interested in solving these problems, shouldn’t it be common-sensical to first of all be able to identify everyone? Nigeria’s Federal Government has paid lip service to this first critical step since 1978! Yes, you read that right. 1978!
After millions of dollars, various law suits, lots of press articles and 40 years, the National Identity Management Commission has only 33 million Nigerians in its database. The DG is quite impressed since just 3 years ago, the Nigerian Identity Database had only 7 million people registered. In his own words,
“NIMC has stepped up its operations, which has seen the enrollment figure with the unique National Identification Number (NIN) now at over 33 million, astronomically up from just seven million three years ago,” — Engr Aziz
You probably did not know this, but from January 1 2019 (that’s in about 18 days time, all Nigerians will be mandated to begin using the NIN to process all transactions and identify themselves according to the latest Newsletter from the NIMC Website
Here is a cutout for you to read
The FEC Approval of the Identity Ecosystem will bring into full force the implementation of the provisions of the NIMC Act 23, 2007, which include the enforce- ment of the mandatory use of the National Identification Number (NIN) by January 1, 2019, and the application of appropriate sanc- tions and penalties on defaulters as provided under Section 28 of the NIMC Act and Regulations.
Now, to avoid these sanctions and penalties or let’s even say to prepare for the massive number of enrollees that would love to avoid these sanctions, the NIMC is targeting 4000 enrollment centers to meet the world bank target of 1 enrollment center for 50,000 people. According to the communications director, “We have registration centres in all the capitals of the 36 states as well as in over 500 local government areas”
And the DG’s concerns 18 days to the deadline is what most DGs in Nigeria have come to love, a state of the art enrollment center. Apart from the newly commissioned headquarters in Ebonyi, “NIMC also commissioned new office in Katsina State as its state headquarters, bringing to an end, the use of a rented apartments as offices,’’
You might want to ask why? To which the communications director also has an answer you’re probably not surprised to read by now.
“An environment that is conducive will help the commission to achieve its vision to provide sustainable world-class identity management solution to affirm identity, enhance governance and service delivery in Nigeria by 2019” — Ogbonna, Communications Director NIMC
Why did I open this piece with the assertion that No country should take Nigeria serious just because Nigerians either have many identity cards or most don’t have any official point of identification?
The answer to this is simple. The foundation of all good public plans or policies that are implementable is data. How do you plan for a nation as huge as Nigeria, set to become the third largest country on earth without information about who they are, where they are, and their status. A good plan has an idea of how many people it’s planning for? It’s why I agree with Dr Joe Abah that Nigeria’s problem is planning, not implementation!
By 2050, China, India and Nigeria will be the top three largest countries by population. India has spent the last five years of their life enrolling up to citizens in an identification programme called Aadhar and now have up to 1.22 billion people enrolled as of July 2018.
Instead of focusing on building headquarters, the UIDAI program has used a network of registrars (government agencies) and enrolment agencies (private agencies) to capture biometric information across the country. To incentivise enrollments, “registrars are provided with an incentive of roughly US$1 per successful enrollment” according to this ID4D Report from the world bank.
And to double effort and results, the UIDAI did not wait for “world class conducive environments” they enrolled 13,350 post offices in India as enrolment centres
It has taken India through the UIDAI 9 years to get 1.22 billion people enrolled in a nationwide identification program that is now coordinated with “payment platforms for Indians, an eKYC and a universal KYR database for all residents of the state”. (Please refer to the ID4D Report)
If you would like to bore yourself with the story of the ‘identity thefts’ and scandals of the NIMC which was previously the Department of National Civic Registration (DNCR), Read this Premium Times Special Investigation of 2015
As we speak, I am yet to see or hear any Presidential Aspirant mention this crucial element of proper policy planning for all their wide range of idealistic and utopian promises and plans like we witnessed in 2015.
How do you build a house without counting the cost? How do you plan for a nation without first being able to identify its citizens? Or as it is now with businesses in Lagos, should we go and bring in Indians to run this very crucial aspect of our planning as a nation?
So until there is a serious step towards this first crucial step, I will maintain my assertion. No country or investor should take Nigeria seriously! The country is a joke! And the joke is on all of us!
Next step — Check out the page www.raisingnewvoices.org/breakthehold, I and a couple of young Nigerians are mobilizing to kick out these leaders starting from parliamentary elections next year.
It’s high time!
