Director General of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Abisoye Coker-Odusote, has shed light on President Bola Tinubu’s sweeping directive to enrol every Nigerian in the national identity database before the end of 2026.

She also explained why the NIN system did not always lead to the arrest of kidnappers and terrorists.

Appearing on a television programme, Coker-Odusote said the President’s mandate was part of a broader Federal Government strategy to build a comprehensive identity system that would underpin governance, planning and service delivery across the country.

Checks by The Guardian showed that NIMC has thus far captured about 136 million Nigerians into the national database.

The NIMC DG disclosed that the Commission is collaborating with partners under the World Bank-supported Identification for Development (ID4D) project to accelerate enrolment nationwide, with private sector front-end partners already enlisted to register citizens on the commission’s behalf. The exercise, she noted, would also help determine Nigeria’s actual population, currently estimated at between 200 million and 250 million.

Responding to concerns about potential multiple registrations, Coker-Odusote said the commission’s biometric verification system made it virtually impossible for an individual to maintain more than one identity, saying that unlike the previous system, which could only detect duplicates after records had been submitted, the current process uses fingerprint and facial recognition to identify and invalidate multiple registrations in real time.