Politics
HUMAN Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA has described as a duplicitous and a waste of time, the decision by the grossly incompetent National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to compel Nigerians to go through the intolerable tortures and untold hardships under the sun and rains of obtaining another national ID card which it announced would be issued to applicants by their banks.
HURIWA asked that in a nation of over 133 million multidimensional and absolutely poor households, how does this NIMC expect the absolutely poor people who are suffering crushing poverty to maintain working bank accounts to enable them collect the so-called single national ID or is this another gambit like the newly apartheid electricity tariff whereby only the rich are allocated 20 hours of electricity daily whilst the rest of us in the hoi poloi or the marginalised and oppressed are left to their cruel fate of existing in perpetual darkness and poverty of electricity power?
Specifically, the NIMC said it is working with the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBSS) to deliver the cards to applicants.
“The card will be issued through the applicants’ respective banks in line with existing protocols with the issuance of the Debit/Credit cards,” the agency said in a Friday update on its official X handle.
HURIWA quoted the NIMC as stating that the new National ID Card is a single, convenient, and General multipurpose card (GMPC) , eliminating the need for multiple cards—not three.
2. The single GMPC has multiple use cases:…
It said applicants need to request their cards with their NIN “through the self-service online portal, NIMC offices, or their respective banks”.
“The card will be powered by the AFRIGO card scheme, an indigenous scheme powered by NIBSS,” NIMC said.
“The card can be picked up by holders at the designated center or delivered to the applicants at the requested location at an extra cost to be borne by the applicants,” the update read.
HURIWA however through the National Coordinator Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko said the plan shows the crass lack of proper articulation of national strategy of formulating and implementing beneficial public policies governing national identity just as the group queried the rationale, the logic and the relevance of frittering and squandering scarce national financial resources to introduce the so-called single national national identity when it is a universal fact that just the international passports of Nigerians are sufficient enough to adequately identify a Nigerian both within and without.
“This is a scheme to rip off Nigeria of monumental and humongous amounts of public funds which will end up in the offshore bank accounts of top leaders of the national ruling All progressive Congress and their mistresses and acolytes.”
“We call on president Bola Ahmed Tinubu to discontinue this sheer misuse of both the commonwealth of Nigerians and the plan to once more subject Nigerians to rounds of ordeals of queuing up in the hot sun or rains all over the country in their banks with a view to access their so-called banks to obtain the dubious national identity card even as the Rights group said it is poor thinking for NIMC to assume that all Nigerians have functional bank accounts to enable them get the ID from those banks.”
The Rights group HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) said physical banks do not exist in over fifty percent of the rural areas of the federation of Nigeria. The group reminded the NIMC that there exists a scientific report that over 50 percent of Nigerians are unbanked and unbankable due to terrible poverty.
HURIWA is of the considered view that this plan is a culmination of a sinister plot by some fast fingers in the corridors of power in Aso Rock Abuja, to use public funds to empower their mistresses, friends and cronies in the name of introducing a single national ID when Nigerians already have Driver’s licences, National Identification Number, and many more of such contraptions including Voter’s cards just as the group urged Nigeria to adopt only the International passports as the most critical ID card.”
14th April, 2024.
C.E.
Tags: HURIWA
