THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has explained why it introduced the use of the National Identity Number (NIN) for the registration of the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
The board said the move was for security reasons and to checkmate examination malpractice, adding that the directive was from the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu.
The Registrar and Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, said this during a virtual meeting with owners of computer-based test centres, service providers and other stakeholders to kick-start the 2021 UTME registration.
He said, “We don’t even require the name of the candidate, we just want the NIN. We will then do the needful to pull the data of the candidate and the process will go on from there.
“It is for security reasons. For us at our small level, it helps us to avoid impersonation, but there is a bigger picture. There is insecurity in the country and we know that many of these problems are there because we have identification problems. We can’t identify every citizen, where he is and what he is doing”.
Explaining how prospective candidates would go about the new move, Oloyede said candidates must make use of accessible SIM cards which have never been used for UTME registration.
He said discussions were ongoing with the Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Pantami, to grant a conditioned waiver to an estimated 20 per cent of candidates without SIM cards.
Early last month, the minister, Dr Pantami had said NIN is the primary and legal identity of all Nigerians.
Pantami hinted that NIN would soon replace the Bank Verification Number (BVN) as the latter is not established by law.
The BVN was launched in 2014 (BVN) by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to protect customer’s transactions but the minister said it was a stop-gap measure.
He said, ”The challenge is that the BVN records may not be 100 percent the same with NIN but what is most important is that the NIN is the primary identity of each and every citizen, including legal residents,” Pantami said.
“BVN is a policy of a bank and has not been established by law, NIN is the only mandatory number and the primary identification of our citizens and every other identification is secondary.
“The NIMC Act 2007 provides that all our citizens must be enrolled and the law gives them 60 days to enroll from the time the law was enacted and a maximum of 180 days and all permanent residents in the country and legal residents that have to stay here for a minimum of 24 months must be enrolled.
“So this is the primary identification of all and all other data bases are supposed to utilize this and not for NIN to utilize the BVN because it is the primary one.
“We discussed with the CBN Governor today on how to ensure that all our citizens with BVN will immediately be provided with the NIN. We are working on that but facilitating the process lies on CBN to make it much easier for our people.
“I made a presentation to National Economic Sustainability Committee and I drew the attention of CBN governor that we need to replace BVN with NIN because the BVN is a bank policy while NIN is a law.”
