SIM Ban Drives NIN Registration To Over 10 Million – NIMC

National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) said not less than 10.3 million Nigerians have been issued National Identification Numbers in the first five months of 2022.

Gatekeepers News reports that the data obtained from the NIMC showed that a total of 82.73 million Nigerians now have their NIN as of May 26, 2022.

According to Commission, as of January 1, 2022, there were only 72.7 million Nigerians with NINs, but the data further grew to 75.36 million as of February 21; 77.1 million unique NINs were recorded as of March 21; and 80.7 million as of April 23.

The data revealed that NIMC issues an average of two million NINs per month which is consistent with what the Director-General of the NIMC, Aliyu Aziz, recently disclosed in an interview on the Frontiers Show on the Nigerian Television Authority.

Aziz had said the commission has the capacity to issue about three million NINs monthly, adding that the present capacity of the agency could accommodate only 100 million Nigerians.

He had said, “We built it (the database) to cater for a 100 million. Right now, we are at eighty million. Also, we have the government’s approval to upgrade it. So, before we reach there, we must have upgraded to about 250 million.

“So, we don’t have issues with that. Most of the time, our major challenges are either power or the bandwidth of the connectivity that we have but not the infrastructure.”

According to GSMA, the global body of telecom operators worldwide, there were 97.5 million unique mobile subscribers in Nigeria as of September 2018. This, therefore, indicated that about 14.77 million telecommunication subscribers still do not have NINs.

Gatekeepers News earlier reported that Federal Government recently directed Telcos to ban erring subscribers from making calls on their lines as a result of the implementation of the government’s SIM-NIN policy.