In what appears to be the strongest indication that the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), is deploying a world class identity management solution for Nigeria, the World Bank’s department for Digital Identification for national development has sent a mission to Nigeria to assess the current effort in fully addressing Nigeria’s 38-year-old problem of identity management.
The two-week working tour of the mission, it was reliably gathered, will conduct a careful study of how Nigeria’s digital identity scheme has been deployed against a ‘best practice’ tool kit developed and published by the World Bank in June 2014.
The team will also conduct in-depth reviews of stakeholders in the identity ecosystem including the National Pension Commission, National Heath Insurance Commission, Federal Road Safety Corps, the Joint Tax Board’s ‘TIN’ scheme, Central Bank’s Bank Verification Number scheme (BVN), the vital registration end of the work of the National Population Commission, PTAD and perhaps the INEC. These other players in the identity ecosystem in Nigeria- all government establishments at the federal level- have still not been able to harmonise with the NIMC scheme following the federal government’s directive to them to do so.
Sources close to the World Bank country office in Nigeria confirmed the development which in part is as a result of the positive international reviews the NIMC Project has been receiving in the last two years especially after the Commission announced its partnership with MasterCard Worldwide and subsequently launched the National eID Card, the second most important milestone of the scheme. Although the source added that there were no commitments yet, the World Bank had visited NIMC a few times last year and based on its initial findings concluded that the Commission was ‘very much on the right part’, leading up to the current mission visit.
Mr Chuks Onyepunuka, NIMC’s general manager, IT/IDD, in chat with LEADERSHIP said “the World Bank team is impressed with our work. It is as if we had a copy of their tool kit all along, but as you may well know, crossing the ‘i’ and dotting the ‘t’ here and there can be time consuming especially when funding constraints play a strong role, we shall see how this intervention can help to fast-track things.”
On his part, Alhaji Hamid Umar, General Manager, Corporate Communication, said “you need to be here to know what we are talking about, it did not just happen yesterday or by chance. We have been at this for sometime now and may be our co-travellers on the identity ecosystem will see the rationale for urgently pushing the integration agenda otherwise we are in for a humongous national expenditure on this issue of digital identity over the next decade and we will still come back to this point.”
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