News:- We can’t produce national identity cards for everyone – NIMC

The National Identity Management Commission has said that it cannot produce national identity cards for everyone who enrolled for it despite the huge public clamour for it.

According to the commission, national identity cards that are ready are mainly for people who enrolled in 2012 and 2013, noting that it was adopting a first-come, first-served approach.

The Director-General, NIMC, Aliyu Aziz, stated these at a press conference in Abuja on Monday, which was organised to announce the 4th International Annual Meeting of the ID4Africa 2018 Movement being hosted by Nigeria.

“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,” he stated.

Aziz explained that the focus of the agency for the next three years would be on the National Identification Number and not on the card.

He said, “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.”

The NIMC boss stated that some vendors had been identified to handle the printing of the national identity cards, but stressed that funding was a challenge.

“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,” Aziz said.