President Tinubu has directed the National Identity Management Commission to enrol every Nigerian in the national identity database by the end of 2026, the agency’s Director-General, Abisoye Coker-Odusote, said on Sunday.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Coker-Odusote disclosed that 137,371,080 Nigerians have been enrolled so far, against a population estimated at 200 to 250 million.
She said NIMC is partnering with private front-end agents under the World Bank-backed Identification for Development project to accelerate registration at the community level.
The directive follows Tinubu’s signing of the NIMC Act 2026 into law on June 26, which repealed the 2007 legislation and made the National Identification Number the country’s foundational identity credential for banking, passports, taxation, pensions and land transactions.
Coker-Odusote said a biometric verification system now prevents duplicate registrations, automatically flagging and invalidating repeat enrolments. She added that private and public organisations, including telecom companies verifying SIM registrations, must now confirm identities through real-time API integration with NIMC rather than capturing biometrics independently.
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