With clear indications of multiple registrations, even if the commission’s efforts at cleansing and harmonising the data yield figures close to 60 million authentic and verifiable registrations, it sure will still provide a big backbone for the cashless society envisaged by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
If we consider that most people using mobile phones engage in monetary transactions, we may not need a soothsayer to predict that the figures will be a good representation of both the banked and the unbanked in Nigeria, and that they will invariably belong to the class of Nigerians who will play in the emerging cashless society.
It is therefore predictable that the cashless Nigeria, envisaged by the CBN, would depend largely on registered SIMs as the most credible and verifiable pool for secure transactions.
It was therefore no surprise why the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah, boasted to the media that the commission has done a very complex job very well, even if yet uncompleted. Juwah’s boast was not only pointed at the amount of data so far gathered and kept in the commission’s backbone infrastructure, but with reference to the associated cost of the project.
With India as a comparative cost reference, Juwah had said the budget proposal for the project, at N6.1 billion, including the cost of building the backbone infrastructure, and cost of data collection at N120 per registration, is the cheapest so far in Nigeria, or anywhere in the world.
If this is true, then the nation would owe the commission a special commendation for bequeathing the first and most credible biometric data of the greatest number of its citizens available for citizen data register, and such other economic programmes like the cashless policy of the CBN, and above all, in responding to the request of the security apparatus for Nigerians to help curb crimes using the pervasive mobile phone technology.
In reaching some conclusions about the costs and availability of the SIM card data, we need to locate the status of similar biometric registrations in the country and the possibility of their availing the nation of the demands of a cashless Nigeria.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) secured an initial budget sum of N74.69 billion for its targeted 70 million voters in 2010, and ended up with an additional budget of N6.6 billion with which it finally registered an estimated 73, 528,040.
Although this data may be very useful to INEC for managing its electoral activities, it may not be same for other uses. The process of data gathering for INEC registration needs to be subjected to serious fidelity check, more so because it is not centralised for the type of information desired for cashless society.
The National Identity Management Commission has secured budget approval estimated at N40 billion for citizenship identity management, which is commendable. But given the fresh start that this agency needs to refocus after several years of waste and confusion created by its previous administrators, it has an uphill task.
Collection and managing biometric data of 167 million people, issuance of national identity cards and managing citizen data from birth to death, is simply a huge task which may well have been simplified with the availability of SIM card registration.
Several other government agencies like the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), Immigration, and the Police have been engaged in nondescript biometric data collection for their specific uses, but the implementation processes have remained amorphous.
There is need, therefore, to begin to harmonise available registrations in the country in such a way as to provide a centralised data for the nation. The huge amount of money expended by INEC for voter registration in the past elections justifies the need to securely manage the data to make them as useful as the SIM card registration.
This is the only way such data would be better applied for the need of the society. Other agencies of government engaged in biometric data gathering should also be streamlined for their usefulness and possibility of integration with existing data such as the SIM card registration.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Christian Ochiama
Quelle/Source: Leadership Newspapers, 15.07.2012
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