Foreigners Have Control Over Data of Nigerians – NIMC, GM

The General Manager, Legal Services, Regulatory and Compliance of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Hadiza Ali Dagabana, has said that the federal government was denied access to previous database of Nigerians collected in 2004.

She aslo stated that the current administration inherited a database that was under the control of foreign of foreigners.

She made the disclosure during an interview with Nigeria Info FM 99.3 on Tuesday, referring to the situation as vendor lock-in, she noted that the situation was when people are compelled to continue using a service regardless of quality, due to the high cost of switching away from it.

There is the likelihood that most Nigerians may have repeated data capture exercise at different times with various government agencies. Despite this, the federal government mandated all Nigerians to provide their national identity number NIN to their telecom service provider for the purpose of pairing both.

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This has led to the clamour for a central database system in which all the data gathered by the various government agencies can share data collected.

The NIMC General Manager stated that the commission lacks access to the national identity card database of Nigerians as captured in 2004.

“For 2004, the database is sitting in our office but we don’t have access to it. We learnt from the mistake of our predecessors to make sure that what we are creating is managed and run by Nigerians 100 percent,” she said.

“What we inherited was not accessible to any Nigerian; it was foreigners, what you call — for those that are in the IT industry — vendor lock-in. So, the vendors locked us out. Nobody can access the system.

“The government negotiated, tried as much as possible to get access but when there is no guarantee that if we are given access, we will find the data the way we wanted to, we just decided to build our system afresh with privacy.

“The issue of vendor lock-in, we had to look into that seriously to make sure that no foreign vendor will lock us in in our country with resources and infrastructure that the government had built.”