By Samuel Akpan
President Bola Tinubu has ordered the National Identity Management Commission to enrol every Nigerian in the national database by the end of 2026, aiming to lay a solid foundation for improved governance and service delivery.
NIMC Director-General and Chief Executive Officer Abisoye Coker-Odusote disclosed the directive while appearing on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme.
“The President has given us till the end of this year to make sure that we capture every single Nigerian,” she said.
She explained that the commission is accelerating the exercise through the World Bank-supported Identification for Development (ID4D) project by engaging private front-end partners.
“These partners, enabled and empowered by NIMC, have been given roles to enrol citizens across the country on the commission’s behalf.”
Coker-Odusote described the National Identification Number as a unique identifier that ensures no individual is registered more than once.
“That’s why it’s called a unique identifier, so that you’re only enrolled once,” she added.
The exercise will also deliver accurate population figures for Nigeria. Current estimates range between 200 million and 250 million people, and the completed database will reveal the precise number to guide national planning and resource allocation.
The commission has been mandated to take the enrolment drive to community levels to reach every citizen, no matter how remote.
On concerns about multiple registrations, Coker-Odusote said the current biometric system now detects and blocks duplicates at the point of capture, unlike the legacy process that only flagged them after submission.
“The legacy system had no way of verifying at the front end whether you had already been captured. Once the record comes into the system, it flags it as a duplicate or that the person already exists in the database.
“You would only have one identity generated for you. The other record goes into a deduplication bucket where it is invalidated,” she stated.
She noted that biometric verification using fingerprints and facial recognition makes it virtually impossible for one person to hold multiple identities.
The recently signed NIMC Act 2026, which President Tinubu approved on June 26, reinforces this by barring other public and private organisations from capturing biometrics independently.
They must now validate identities through API integration with NIMC.
Telecommunications companies already apply this model. They capture facial biometrics for SIM card registration and match them in real time against the NIMC database.
“We are using biometric validation to tighten security around identity confirmation,” Coker-Odusote said.
The new law cements the “One Person, One Identity” policy and makes the National Identification Number the foundational credential for accessing government and essential private services, including banking, passport applications, tax administration, pensions, land transactions and consumer credit.
Coker-Odusote stressed the wider importance of the exercise, saying: “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?
“We have been mandated by Mr President to go down to the community levels to enrol every single Nigerian,” she said.
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