penchant for dangerous romance with controversy. In fact, some think that controversy is the middle name of Nigeria’s minister of communication and digital economy. Sometime in May 2020, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, the efficient executive chairperson of Nigeria Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM) ran from pillar to post telling anyone who cared to listen that Pantami was behind the armed men who forced NIDCOM workers out of the apartment allocated to the commission in NCC building, and that NIDCOM computers and other equipment were locked up for weeks, allegedly on Pantami’s orders.
NCC offered a lame excuse for the brutal ouster. At the end of the whole episode Pantami denied involvement in the ouster of NIDCOM. However, those who could read between the lines actually deciphered where the order for NIDCOM humiliating ouster came from.
The dust raised by the NIDCOM ouster was still settling when Pantami set the whole country boiling with an order that neither the Nigeria Identity Management Commission (NIMC) nor the mobile network operators can obey. The press release from Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) on the controversial directive, gave the impression that stakeholders at the meeting summoned by Pantami agreed that all subscribers to the mobile telephone networks should supply their national identity number (NIN) to the operators for synchronizing with their registration, and that network operators should block the lines of subscribers who fail to supply the NIN within two weeks of the issuance of the order on December 16, 2020.
The network operators themselves were not spared the minister’s dangling sword. They were warned that failure to block any line without a NIN by December 30, 2020, would attract severe penalties including the withdrawal of their operating licenses.
The deceit in the press release from NCC which gave the impression that stakeholders agreed to the deadline and penalties became obvious last week when the network operators complained that they would need a minimum of six months to do what Pantami wants them to do in two weeks. They have to verify each of the outstanding 165 million NINs with an organization as clumsy and rudderless as NIMC. No one can do that in two weeks.
Even the NIMC has inadvertently admitted that it would need at least six months to assign NINs to 165 million Nigerians. Only 43 million were registered in the last 13 years. Given its abhorring clumsiness and lethargy, NIMC would need a minimum of two years to execute the minister’s order.
From all indications, the tight deadline during end-of-year festivities was not the consensus of stakeholders present at the meeting summoned by Pantami. There could not have been a consensus in a gathering of terrorized ‘pupils’ and a virulent village headmaster wielding a big stick. The minister just issued a tyrannical directive to the stakeholders and they nodded timidly, while waiting for him at the other end when the directive would have plunged Nigeria into economic and social disaster.
A few days after Pantami’s threat to subscribers and mobile network operators, subscribers stormed NIMC ill-equipped facilities around the federation for their registration procedures. That was when the first danger endemic in the order was noticed.
By some estimates well over 700, 000 applicants descended on NIMC facilities. The NIMC office at Alausa, Lagos was so plagued by a deluge of humanity that the state government dispatched its task force on COVID-19 to disperse the crowd to avoid rapid spread of the deadly virus as applicants threw COVID-19 preventive measures to the wind.
But the damage had been done. The surging crowd had invaded the building for several hours before Lagos state government could mobilise its task force to the scene. The edgy officials of NIMC shut the facility before the state COVID-19 task force could meander its way through columns of traffic gridlocks to Alausa. That was the first sign that Isa Pantami was marching Nigerians down the slaughter slab.
NIMC’s gross incompetence is primarily to blame for the apathy of applicants to the registration exercise. Those who dared to register for the exercise in the last 13 years spent a minimum of five hours to obtain what is dubiously tagged “tracking number”.
A woman who did the registration in 2009 went to the NIMC office at Alausa with her 18-month-old baby and queued for five hours with her rampaging baby. Today, the boy is in JSS-2, but the woman does not have the national ID card.
The tracking number issued her that day is rejected anywhere she presents it for identification. That is precisely why few cared to waste their time trying to register for the national ID Card.
What Pantami has done at a time of COVID-19 resurgence borders on tragic population control measure. The minister is marching Nigerians to the slaughter slab.
Thousands certainly contracted the deadly virus on the first day that close to one million applicants stormed NIMC facilities across the nation. Thousands would die in silence from the virus.
That would shift by a few minutes, the explosion time of Nigeria’s ticking population time-bomb.
Everyone is worried by the graveyard silence from the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19. The PTF has shut down night clubs, hotels and event centers, but sees nothing wrong with Pantami ordering 164 million Nigerians to obtain non-existent NIN in two weeks at NIMC facilities that cannot seat 20 if COVID-19 physical distancing measures are applied. The PTF has not said a word about the dangerous gatherings at NIMC facilities. That silence borders on conspiracy.
NIMC was not, and is still not, ready for the massive registration imposed by Pantami’s catastrophic deadline. The public enlightenment programme that should have followed a relaxed deadline is yet to commence.
There are reports trending in the social media to the effect that everyone with a bank verification number (BVN) has been automatically allocated a NIN which could be retrieved from NIMC website without the cumbersome registration procedure. No one can verify that claim.
The bio-data that NIMC needs for NIN is what the network operators used to register their subscribers four years ago. They have that information on 207.5 million active phone lines. The data could as well be derived from drivers’ licenses, voters’ cards and BVNs. NIMC has not leveraged on that.
Pantami’s pronouncements are orders issued without regard to the consequences of blocking millions of phone lines at a time when 60 per cent of the paper works and meetings are handled digitally. It is a dangerous romance with tyranny.
