The
Federal Government’s efforts at harmonizing biometric data captured by
different agencies in the country has received a major boost, as the Executive
Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Professor Umar
Garba Danbatta, has agreed to release the commission’s data from the ongoing
Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards registration exercise to the National
Identity Management Commission (NIMC).
While
receiving the Director General of NIMC, Engr. Aliyu A Aziz, who paid him a
courtesy call in Abuja, Danbatta said the decision to release the data is in
line with similar Federal Government’s instruction to transfer validated data
to the sister agency.
It
can, however, be recalled that inter-agency and other stakeholders’
collaboration is a key component of the 8-Point Agenda the Professor of telecommunications
engineering unveiled in February this year, with a view to moving the industry
forward.
“I
would like to pledge our commitment to this cooperation between the NIMC and
the NCC to ensure that we have a secure, reliable database containing biometric
information for all Nigerians, which will definitely augur well for the
security of the country among other benefits,” he noted.
“So
we are committed to this. We recognize the importance of this cooperation and I
would like to stress the need to give it all the seriousness it deserves. I am
happy that there’s an MoU and
there’s also a Federal Government’s directive,
which would help in facilitating the data transfer,” he added.
The
EVC, however, called for the reinvigoration of the existing inter-agency
committee handling the exercise in order to fast-track the piece-meal data
transfer to NIMC.
In
the same vein, the EVC directed the NCC to ensure that the data transferred to
NIMC are fully backed up to avoid any hitches in future.
Responding
to a question at the occasion, however, the NIMC boss who expressed delight at
the cooperation between the two agencies, said that the data transfer from NCC
would also improve the ongoing National Identification Number (NIN) exercise of
the commission.
He
said NIMC would use the NCC’s data to assign NIN to Nigerians who were captured
in the validated data received.
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