21 million Nigerians issued national ID number, says NIMC

The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) says 21,360,000 Nigerians have been issued the national identification number as at Wednesday last week.

The commission said it has also setup more enrolment centres across the country, bringing the number of existing centres to 805.

In a statement on Monday, Amaka Eze of NIMC corporate communications unit said the commission is currently deploying additional enrolment centres in 556 local government areas.

She said it is also working to activate dormant centres in the remaining 218 councils.

“This is in line with the goal of the director general/ceo of the commission, Engr. Aliyu Aziz, to register 28 million Nigerians into the database, by the end of December 2017,” the statement read.

“According to him, the commission has continued to record exponential growth in the population of the database, despite the challenges facing the commission, even as the country gradually exists recession.

“It will be recalled that the commission had little above seven million NINs in the database when Engr. Aziz took over the mantle of leadership in November, 2015.

“Despite the challenges and constraints, the director general who is undaunted, has continued to manage the scarce resources, to ensure that the database is populated before commencing enforcement of the mandatory use of the NIN for all identity based transactions.”

The federal government had earlier said starting from 2018, no Nigerian will obtain or renew their international passports without having the national identification number.