The recently “concluded” National Identity Numbers (NIN) registration for Nigerians is one thing or exercise that is very important. It is said that it will bring down crime, identify real Nigerians and people have argued that it is duplicity but the issue of banning over 72 million of Nigerians from making basic uses of their phones such as making calls via their mobile phones is a bleeding the economy.
Many have argued that, with SIM registrations where Nigerians queued up in various Telecommunication centers to register to their bank verification Numbers (BVN) where Nigerians line up again for that so that they can get their numbers to enable them bank. Nigerians lined up again for voters’ card, driver’s license, passports etc, all these are forms of valid ways of identifying us Nigerians then NIMC came to town with theirs. Nigerians were of the opinion that they have escaped these now they realized that they cannot make calls again due to NIN number! That is the quagmire of about 72 million of Nigerians as of today.
Being run by National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), this agency has put a deadline on the registration and syncing of these numbers with their mobile phones till March 31st. Today about 50% of Nigerians mobile phone or GSM users have been barred from making calls till they get their NIN numbers synced with their devices. This has already rendered these Nigerians incommunicado!
Some of these Nigerians like the average mechanic can’t even call the parts seller to supply him parts, the lady that is baking cakes can’t order for flour, the boy going to school can’t call the parents to come pick him up! The driver can’t call the boss to inform him of the necessary repairs in his car. These set of Nigerians are in crossroads or quagmire and these are the artisans that drive the economy! These are the over 50% of phone users mentioned ab initio!
Do we blame the regulator of the telecoms space for sitting down and watch the industry loose about 40% of their revenue through calls being lost? I do not blame the NCC to an extent, I do not think they should be blamed here, think that the blame should be on the government and NIMC! The NCC are just acting according to directives in my own view, the NCC is one of the foremost regulators that knows their onions and they are not happy that the telecom industry is bleeding! If Nigerians can’t make calls, the industry loses money, and if the industry loses money, NCC will be sad and unhappy but MIMC doesn’t care because their do not play in the telecommunication ecosystem, and also if Nigerians do not make calls, the government loses money from tax and interconnect, termination rates!
Do NIMC know these basic principles of telecommunications, I doubt that they do, if they do, they can’t stop over 70 million of Nigerians from making calls. We are talking billion lost weekly here as revenue! That is the clearer picture and folks must start smelling the coffee and know how are cookies are crumbling in such a perilous economy. From the above deductions, one can understand that NCC might not and will not be happy seeing the telecom ecosystem bleed!
There is no place in the world that the greater part of citizenry is stopped from communicating just because of they didn’t have their national identity numbers, this is akin to disrupting the greater public their freedom of speech and communication. And the Nigerian government through their agency NIMC have successfully denied Nigerians of this crucial right to speech and communication via this fiasco of mandating NCC to stop their communication while the telecoms industry loses billions daily due to this ill-conceived fact.
Stopping people from communication is very bad way of ensuring that people register up, this NIN numbers of a thing can be likened to social security numbers of many countries, unfortunately, we Nigerians are copycats but bad ones for that matter.
Having a full data base of citizens is crucial, we are thinking that b now NIMC would have been creative by ensuring their online platform is robust where people abroad and diaspora can have their registration done seamlessly. A lot of Nigerians have been in diaspora for many years like three years upwards, they make use of their numbers to transacts businesses at home, they roam these lines and how do you expect them not to make calls due to the singular fact that they do not have NIN numbers our own version of social security numbers. Doing this have successfully cut off these set of Nigerians out! This means the scarce forex we are looking for is cut off! This is cutting the nose to spite the face!
NIMC should be creative, you can’t just wake up one morning and cut of Nigerians! What about those in incarceration? What those in prisons? What about the Nigerians in mental asylums or sanatoriums? what about those Nigerians that have been in admission at various hospitals for months that were unable to do their NIN registrations? Are we saying that because they are incapacitated, they shouldn’t reach out to their family and friends to get support especially those in the health facilities, we understand that those in prisons “cannot make calls”, but what about others? Are they less Nigerians?
There is various way to catch a monkey, you can use a banana or you can use other fruits to catch the monkey, that is a popular saying, what this means is that NIMC should be able to find a middle ground in dealing with this errant and erratic Nigerians that have (un)willingly refused to be captured or counted. Many of their grouse is that they are tired of the government data policies and inconstancies. They have many valid arguments and they are right, what they haven’t thought of is doing a class action against NIMC demanding billions in terms of damages due to loss of revenue from their inability to make calls. Some have questioned the constitution and its position of stopping their fundamental rights of freedom of speech by NIMC? They have asked if NIMC was mandated to take this right away from them? But they are yet to think of class action or any ambitious legal luminary taking up these cases.
In sane climes and nations, there are majors that are taken to ensure that folks get social security Numbers such as inability to get a decent job, inability to get good medical service. Let me break it down, the SSN which is known as the social security number is composed of three parts the first three digits are known as area number, then group number which is two digits while the last is serial numbers. We are yet to understand how NIN grouped their numbers and what they are doing about the dead Nigerians that have NIN. What are criminal elements that will the numbers of the dead to do crazy things like SIM card registrations? Is this nit what NIMC is trying to avoid? What if people get the NIN of dead Nigerians and use it to buy SIM cards and get it registered? Is there a mechanism that is in place to counter this? Did NIMC think of this? Did NCC think of this? Did the telecoms stakeholders such as ALTON, ATCON etc think of this? they ought to know by now that Nigerians are some of the smartest bunches on the face of earth and what are they doing to be in tandem with these “smartness” or bunch of smart Aleks hovering around in our ecosystem?
To ensure about 95% compliance NIMC must devise ways to ensure that Nigerians comply not tampering with their devices. Stopping their devices from communicating is a wrong devise. In other countries as mentioned they have devised ingenious means to ensure that people have their SSN that even make people que for them without even compelled to. The USA government created theirs about 1936 to track how much Americans make during their lifetime and calculate their social benefits. Do NIMC have any form of social benefits for Nigerians after unblocking or unbarring our ability to call ourselves?
With the Social Security Number, you need to have it to collect government benefits, get a job and use for identification. So, in this case where do we place NIN numbers? It is of the opinion that NIMC should harmonize their data as the topmost identity protection agency, they are what CBN is to bank and what NCC is to telecoms, they should harmonize various agencies from CBN, NCC, INEC, FRSC, IMMIGRATION and others that collect identities and sync them with their own data to give Nigerians their unique identities without having to go through making Nigerians que and then for those that didn’t que get the Easter present of not calling their loved ones to wish them Happy Easter. NIMC must start looking at how to deploy robust technology, rejig their IT infrastructure and build world-class capacity that can mandate above mentioned agencies to sync their data in their highly secured tier IV data center and cloud. This sync will make creating of national identity number seamless for many Nigerians without queuing under the sun or loosing ability to make calls. A simple artificial intelligence (AI) solution can get this done.
Anthony Emeka Nwosu
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