By 
By Oluwatobi Opusunju
Only about 30.5 million Nigerians out of a population of more than 180million people have been able to enroll for the National Identification Number (NIN).
The Director-General of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Aliyu Aziz has attributed the slow enrolment process to sectorial and infrastructure issues.
The NIN consists of 11 non- intelligible numbers randomly chosen and assigned to an individual at the completion of enrolment into the National Identity Database (NIDB). It is used to tie all records about an individual in the database and is also used to establish or verify his/her identity.
In a recent interview with journalists, Azziz blame high cost of opening and managing an enrolment centre across the country for the slow pace in facilitating enrolment of citizens into the NIDB.
Enrolment centres need stable power supply and active internet connection to function effectively. But these challenges have connived with other issues such as poor salary structure for workers to make opening and managing an enrolment centre tough.
However, Aziz assured that the commission was working round the challenges to enroll additional 50 million Nigerians by the end of 2018. “We are slowly moving past these challenges as we ramp up more data into the database,” said Aziz.
