NATIONAL: Crowds throng NIMC office for NINs amid spread of Covid-19

MASSIVE crowds thronged the office of the National Identity Management Commission in Lagos on Monday in a bid to beat the deadline given by the Nigerian Communications Commission to register and obtain the National Identity Number.

The NCC had ordered telecommunications companies to block the Subscriber Identity Modules of phone users who have no NIN.

NCC gave December 30, as the deadline to get the NIN after the SIM will be blocked.

Though the House of Representatives had called on the NCC to extend the deadline for the block of SIMs, citing the festive period as the reason people many subscribers may not be able to beat the initial deadline, many Nigerians are not leaving anything to chances.

Currently, only about 41.5 million Nigerians out of an estimated 198 million active phone subscribers have NIN.

Most of the people, who gathered at the NIMC office in Alausa, were either not wearing face masks or not observing physical distancing, thereby flouting the protocol put in place by the government in a bid to tackle the spread of Covid-19 which has been on the increase in the last one week.

Several concerned Nigerians had expressed concern over the sudden directive of the Federal Government and had asked that the deadline given for the registration be extended but the government has remained adamant.

The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project had described the order as an abuse of human rights and threatened to sue the Federal Government within seven days if it is not rescinded.

The Federal Government recently approved the licensing of 173 centres and 30 state government institutions to conduct enrolment of persons into the National Identity Database. However, it was learnt that most of these entities could not start the process immediately because they lacked the infrastructure and equipment to do so.

Telecoms giant, MTN, which is one of the firms given the licence to enrol persons into the NIMC database, announced on Saturday that it was importing 14, 000 devices for the NIN registration and they are expected to arrive in two weeks.