Beyond the rhetoric of claiming that the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) cannot produce national identity cards for everyone who enrolled for it, the Act establishing the agency is very clear card issuance after all.

NIMC Act provided that the agency should issue a general multipurpose card that is secure to Nigerians after being captured in its database.

In his press briefing to herald the 4th International Annual Meeting of the ID4Africa 2018 Movement being hosted by Nigeria, Director General of NIMC, Engineer Aliyu Aziz revealed that the agency had only managed to fund the production of National ID cards for Nigerians that enrolled since 2012 and 2013.

According to him, “The card that we have now is the best in the whole world, but it is difficult to really produce it for everyone. In the NIMC, the focus is first come, first served, and this is for those who enrolled in 2012 and 2013, as they are the ones who have got their cards”.

However, many Nigerians who spoke to Business Hilights in parts of the country on the performance of NIMC in the last few years, expressed mixed feelings on why after struggling to get registered and captured with their National Identity Number (NIN) slip which is not durable, the agency has refused to issue them their ID cards which by law, is their right.

But rather than working out how the challenge of funding will be eased, Aziz explained that the focus of the agency for the next three years would be on the NIN and not on the card.

In his argument, the DG noted that “The focus is actually on the National Identification Number. Your NIN gives you your identity and not the card. Historically, we focused ourselves on the card to be the output of what we do; but when the country went into recession, we stepped back and checked and found out that in the United States, it is the Social Security Number that connects all the other agencies”.

“In the United Kingdom, it is the National Insurance Number; and in India where recently they enrolled about 1.4 billion people, they only gave the number. This means you can now pull your own NIN and then print it the way you want it.

“Recently in Nigeria, we did the Bank Verification Number; and again, what you get is a number and not a BVN card. However, this does not mean that we won’t give out cards, because it is there in the law that we should issue a general multipurpose card that is secure.”

On why the cards are not being continuously printed, Aziz revealed that “We want to ask the vendors to print, for we have like five vendors in Lagos that can print these cards. So, we want to get the funding to print the cards by outsourcing it to the vendors. Right now, we are focused on enrolling people and harmonising their identities, which is why the number grew from five million to 30 million in our record. But on the ID cards, we have not done much”.

An inside source at NIMC confided in our correspondent that apart from paucity of funding, there are some production issues between the agency and initial set of vendors that are yet to be resolved and that explained the reasons for the sudden halt in ID card production nationwide.

No top official of the agency volunteered to confirm this information as at press time.