The National Identity Management Commission, NIMC, in a freshly vetted report which is a response to the News that has been making rounds about the loss of some NIN details in their database has openly refuted reports that the National Identity Number, NIN, records of Nigerians are missing from its database.
NIMC’s Head of Corporate Communications, Kayode Adegoke, said reports that the commission lost 7.9 million NIN of Nigerians were false and misleading.
A news platform had reported that NIMC may have lost 7.9m NIN records of Nigerians.
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Reacting, Adegoke, in a statement he signed, assured Nigerians that its database is safe and secure.
According to Adegoke, NIMC database is impenetrable; hence no data can go missing.
He said: “NIMC has noticed with great dismay an erroneous and malicious news report published in the Nigerian Tribune of June 7, 2022, with the deceptive and misleading headline: Did NIMC Lose NIN Records of 7.9 Million Nigerians?
“In the said misleading report, the writer insinuated that NIMC lost 7.9m NIN records of Nigerians; the writer also gave varying inaccuracies of the NIMC database in an attempt to confuse and misinform the general public, including wrongly stating that the National Identification Number (NIN) is a 10-digit number.
“The Management of NIMC wishes to reassure Nigerians that our database remains intact and impenetrable, and, no NIN records could have been missing.”
He noted that the NIN is an “11-digit unique number.”
Adegoke urged Nigerians to ignore the said report, stressing that it was a product of the “writer’s infantile imagination.”
At least 10.3 million Nigerians have been issued National Identification Numbers in the first five months of 2022, data obtained from the National Identity Management Commission’s portal have shown.
This brings the total number of Nigerians with NINs to 82.73 million as of May 26, 2022. The data on the NIMC’s portal showed that as of January 1, 2022, there were 72.7 million Nigerians with NINs.
It added that the number of unique NIN grew to 75.36 million as of February 21; 77.1 million unique NINs were recorded as of March 21; and 80.7 million as of April 23.
The data reveals that NIMC issues an average of two million NINs per month which is consistent with what the Director-General of the NIMC, Aliyu Aziz, recently disclosed in an interview on the Frontiers Show on the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA.
According to him, the commission has the capacity to issue about three million NINs monthly. He added that the present capacity of the agency could accommodate only 100 million Nigerians.
He had said, “We built it (the database) to cater for a 100 million. Right now, we are at eighty million. Also, we have the government’s approval to upgrade it. So, before we reach there, we must have upgraded to about 250 million.
“So, we don’t have issues with that. Most of the time, our major challenges are either power or the bandwidth of the connectivity that we have but not the infrastructure.”
