NIMC Targets Full NIN Enrolment by Year-End, Reveals How Kidnappers Evade Tracking

The Director-General of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Abisoye Coker-Odusote, has revealed that Nigeria has enrolled over 137.3 million people into the National Identification Number (NIN) database, while reiterating the Federal Government’s target of registering every Nigerian before the end of the year.

Speaking during an interview with Channels Television’s Programme Sunday Politics with Seun Okinbaloye, Coker-Odusote said the NIN remains the foundation of Nigeria’s identity and security architecture, but explained that terrorists and kidnappers often evade tracking by using the mobile phones of their victims instead of their own.

“We already know the National Identification Number (NIN) is the foundational identity for Nigeria’s security architecture. But you’ll find that, a lot of the time, kidnappers use the phones of the people they have abducted. So, how do you trace them when they are not using their own phones?” she said.

According to the NIMC boss, 137,371,080 Nigerians had been enrolled in the NIN database as of the latest count, noting that the figure still falls short of the country’s estimated population.

She explained that while Nigeria’s population has been variously estimated at between 200 million and 250 million, only a comprehensive enrolment exercise would provide the country’s actual population data.

“You cannot plan without data. Your identity is basically the foundation for effective governance and service delivery. How can you plan if you don’t know the total number of persons that you have?” she said.

Coker-Odusote disclosed that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has directed NIMC to ensure that every Nigerian is captured in the national identity database before the end of the year.

To achieve the target, she said the commission has partnered with front-end enrolment agents under the World Bank’s Identification for Development (ID4D) project, expanding community-level registration across the country.

She also dismissed concerns that individuals could obtain multiple NINs, explaining that the commission’s biometric verification system prevents duplicate identities.

According to her, although duplicate enrolment attempts may occur, the system automatically detects matching fingerprints and facial biometrics, flags the duplicate records, and invalidates them during a deduplication process, ensuring that each person is assigned only one unique identity.

The NIMC Director-General further said recent legal reforms have strengthened the commission’s exclusive role in biometric identity management.

She explained that private and public organisations will no longer independently maintain biometric identity databases for verification purposes. Instead, they will validate identities through NIMC’s application programming interface (API), which authenticates individuals against the national database in real time.

Coker-Odusote noted that telecommunications companies are already using the system during SIM card registration, where applicants’ facial biometrics are matched instantly with NIMC records to confirm their identities.

She said the real-time biometric verification process is designed to tighten identity security, reduce fraud, and strengthen Nigeria’s digital identity ecosystem.