NINs Without Physically Verifiable Addresses Should Be ‘Yanked Off’ Database, Says Former NIPOST CEO Adegbuyi

Former Postmaster General of Nigeria and CEO of NIPOST, Bisi Adegbuyi, has asserted that in order to protect the data of Nigerians and to salvage the issue of compromise, any National Identification Number (NIN) without a physically verifiable address should be taken off the Nigeria’s identification database.

In an interview with ARISE NEWS on Thursday, Adegbuyi highlighted that Nigeria’s recent signing of the memorandum of understanding with the Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) is a step in the right direction which will fail if the foundational element of address verification is not robustly implemented.

He said, “Before you converge data, there must be a multi-stakeholders’ approach to it. We must clean up the NIMC identity ecosystem and ensure it is address based. Any NIN that is not integrated with an address that can be physically verified and an address verification certificate should be yanked off the database.

“We recall that Bill Gates met with the President of Nigeria in Saudi Arabia during the world economic forum and the sidelines. Don’t take my word for it but Bill Gates said we have been dealing with your identity ecosystem and it is quite scattered and that we have been discussing with the minister of finance and coordinating economy on the latest technology on the identity system which is called Modular open-source identity platform (MOSIP) incubated and developed by the international institute of technology development having been inspired by the overwhelming success of Aadhaar, the Indian system which is the world’s largest end to end identity system.”

He also remarked, “The idea of MOSIP was incubated and inspired by the outstanding success of Aadhaar. MOSIP is open source and not for profit. But here is the problem, if you are going to copy a system, you must be able to also copy the fundamentals of those systems. Nigeria has signed the memorandum of understanding but I am submitting that if you don’t have the foundation for that system, that is physically verifiable addresses, it will fail because it will amount to building a castle on a shaky foundation.”

He advocated for a stress test of the NIMC identity ecosystem, ensuring all addresses linked to NINs are verified based on longitude and latitude.

Adegbuyi also shared his vision of providing 102 billion, three-meter by three-meter grid digital addresses to Nigerians, a project he aimed to achieve during his tenure as Postmaster General but faced bureaucratic hurdles.

“The biggest market for e-commerce for Africa is Nigeria and that is why we need to get it right. Recall that anytime a bank appears to be insolvent, what the regulator does is to subject it to a stress test. So, we just subject the NIMC identity ecosystem to a stress test. All the names that have been attached to a residential address; the addresses must be verified.

“I have got 102 billion, three meters by three meters grid digital addresses that I want to give to Nigerians. I wanted to do it as post master general but you know Nigeria is always at war with itself and you know in the federal civil service, the constituted bureaucracy, so when it got there, they killed it.”

The former postmaster General further stressed the need for synergy between NIMC and NIPOST. He proposed that while NIMC supplies the identity number, NIPOST would handle the last mile of digitally verifying those addresses.

“NIPOST is a vital national infrastructure that takes care of the last mile. There must be synergy between NIMC and NIPOST. NIMC supplies the identity number, then Nipost should be involved in the last mile of Digitally verifying those addresses. It is not rocket science. Don’t forget Bill Gate is coming with his MOSIP. But can we do a comparative analysis of the identity ecosystems in other jurisdictions? The technology is here. I own it. I have what they call MVP, Agile, scalable, with a full application program interface. Nigeria has spent money on me. As postmaster general, I was exposed to several international workshops and capacity building but I wanted to bring back to Nigeria the benefits of the investment.”

Chioma Kalu

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