The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has up to the end of this year to mandatorily enroll every Nigerian in the national identity database before the end of 2026.
The commission’s Director-General, Abisoye Coker-Odusote, disclosed this on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, where she also said the directive was part of the Federal Government’s plan to build a comprehensive national identity system to support governance, planning and service delivery.
“The president has given us till the end of this year to make sure that we capture every single Nigerian,” she said.
She said the NIMC is working with partners under the World Bank-supported Identification for Development (ID4D) project to accelerate enrolment nationwide.
Coker-Odusote said “we have partnered through the World Bank ID4D project with front-end partners. They are part of the digital identity ecosystem. These are private citizens that we’ve enabled and given jobs to enroll citizens on our behalf.”
She said the National Identification Number(NIN) serves as a unique identifier, ensuring that each individual is enrolled only once.
“That’s why it’s called a unique identifier, so that you’re only enrolled once,” she added.
Coker-Odusote said the exercise would also help determine Nigeria’s actual population, adding that current estimates range between 200 million and 250 million people.
“When we’re done enrolling, we will then know the actual numbers = we have. Some estimates say 230 million, while a few people say 250 million.
“Your identity is basically the foundation for effective governance and service delivery. How can you plan if you don’t know the total number of persons that you have? We have been mandated by Mr President to go down to the community levels to enrol every single Nigerian,” she said.
The NIMC boss said the commission’s biometric verification system prevents individuals from obtaining more than one identity, adding that while the previous system detected duplicate enrolments only after records had been submitted, the current system identifies and invalidates duplicates through biometric verification.
“The legacy system had no way of verifying at the front end whether you had already been captured. Once the record comes into the system, it flags it as a duplicate or that the person already exists in the database.
“You would only have one identity generated for you. The other record goes into a deduplication bucket where it is invalidated,” she said.
She added that biometric verification, including fingerprints and facial recognition, makes it virtually impossible for one person to maintain multiple identities.
