The card will be issued to Nigerians who have attained the age of 16 years and above, and is expected serve as voting card in the 2019 general elections. According to the NIMC, about 100 million e-identity cards would have been issued to Nigerians at the completion of the pilot phase programme.
President Jonathan praised the outcome of the partnership between NIMC, the U.S. firm MasterCard and Access Bank to make the scheme a reality. Under the partnership, the NIMC is the project leader; MasterCard provides the technology while Unified Payment Services Limited serves as the payment processor. While Cyptovision is the Public Key Infrastructure and Trust Services Provider, Access Bank Plc is the pilot issuing bank. Describing it as the broadest financial inclusion programme in Africa, the NIMC said it was working with other government agencies to harmonize all identity databases including the driver’s license, voter registration, health insurance, tax, SIM card, and National Pension Commission to share services platform.
For decades, the national identity card project has been a work in progress, years after it was due to be up and running. However, any notion that with the recent development a breakthrough had been achieved was tempered by the discovery that the identity card, a key instrument of identification recognized by the country’s Constitution, bears MasterCard’s logo, raising the question of sovereignty.
Certainly, contracting the management of vital information concerning Nigerian citizens to a foreign private commercial entity calls to question the possibility of serious security and economic breaches. If the NIMC took such security implications into consideration, its officials did not mention them. But to surrender the symbol of national pride and sovereignty to a foreign commercial organization by sharing the biometrics of over 100 million Nigerians to the firm goes beyond mere lucrative business partnership. It is ridiculous that the firm’s insignia is engraved on the identity card, making nonsense of any sense of the ‘national’ in the management. This is indeed a costly oversight for any sovereign nation in a world that in recent years experienced aggressive data surveillance by security and intelligence agencies of, in particular, the United States of America, MasterCard’s home base.
Besides giving away the national pride, one of the most egregious components of the deal is that the project when fully operational will make all Nigerian adults to be direct and compulsory customers of MasterCard. There is no country in the world that has done it in the way the NIMC sealed the pact of the e-national identity card project with MasterCard. Malaysia, for instance, was reportedly the first country to implement a general multi-purpose identity card. It did so with its own resources and technology to protect its citizens. The bio-data and other pieces of information of Nigeria’s national identity management database about citizens are just too sensitive to be exposed to a foreign establishment, whether governmental or non-.
While the e-identity card scheme is without question a positive development, its integrity is marred by the terms of the inclusion of MasterCard in the management. The NIMC should re-negotiate the deal in the form that it guarantees that the privacy of Nigerians collected in the databases would remain in Nigeria and be managed by Nigerians. If the government is not economically strong to make it a one hundred percent indigenous project in terms of funding and management, the exercise can wait until when the nation’s economy is vibrant enough to accommodate it so that the national symbol and sovereignty can be preserved. The need for a biometric database should not be at the expense of national security concerns.
If the existing national identity card is anything to be called a legal tender, nothing stops the NIMC from upgrading the database available by renewing the card for those who already have one and issuing a new one for those who don’t.
