THE National Identity Database was finally activated last week in Nigeria, thereby strengthening the goal to reliably identify all citizens and residents of Nigeria.
The feat was achieved on Thursday, February 23, at the head office of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the agency charged to develop and manage a national identity management system for the country.
It was an emotional moment for most of the database administrators, their network colleagues and other data centre staff, when at about 7.00 p.m. that day, a test data was obtained from a gentleman to kick-start the process. With that step, the database was switched to the production environment.
To mark the milestone, Director-General of NIMC, Chris Onyemenam, joined the directors to enrol their data and to make speeches that paid tribute to the effort of their team and restated their commitment to delivering a world-class identity management system.
“It has been a long journey to this point. Meeting up with the various international best practice standards was not easy,” an elated Onyemenam said. “We are delighted to be building the best database in Nigeria, with the highest level of security, and with the best and cleanest data of citizens.’’
It will be recalled that NIMC promised last year to commence enrolment of citizens’ data in the first quarter of 2012.
The switch over to the production environment is in fulfilment of that promise. Sources close to the Director Operations, Mrs Cecilia Yahaya, revealed that the enrolment centres nationwide are being prepared for commissioning in April. Once commissioned, enrolment activities would henceforth be provided every working day at these centres by NIMC’s private sector partners, Chams and the One secured card Consortia.