ONE disturbing trend is developing in Nigeria: We are caught in the claws of over-registration, thus reducing every Nigerian to a number. He is a number on the assembly-line; on the pay-roll; on the school register; in the tax office; on the voters’ register; in the banking hall; in his political party; and, indeed, he is a number everywhere!
Wherever he goes, he is encumbered with the business of one form of registration or the other, to the extent that he spends a good part of his time on the registration line; and the authorities are perhaps oblivious that the loss of man-hour on some of these needless registrations takes a heavy toll on the nation’s economy, talk less of the stress and strain they place on the people!
In the course of a single year, the Nigerian is either busy registering or re-registering in his political party or he is engaged in registering or re-registering to vote. When he is not busy collecting the temporary voter’s card, he is struggling to get the permanent voter’s card. When he is not busy revalidating the National Identity Card, he is busy attending to the National Population Commission, as if life is all about registration.
The telephone companies are also asking him either to register his number or revalidate it. These are all rigorous forms of registration and re-registration. In the process, they make criminals out of otherwise innocent citizens. The other day, a message was left on a man’s cell-phone, “the owner of this line has been barred from receiving calls”. You can imagine what his business partners in America thought when they got that message: “This must be another Nigerian; a bundle of fraud-stars!” The dent thus put on the man’s integrity is indelible.
Meanwhile, they are busy off-loading useless messages into your phone. They inundate you with unnecessary caller-tunes. In May, they inform you that “your subscription for ‘Come O ye Faithful’ and other Christmas carols have been automatically renewed”.
Again, the Banks are doing their own. Almost on an annual basis, you are compulsorily required to update and revalidate your account. Sometimes, they ask you to come and register for one flimsy verification number or another. Failure to comply within a given period would lead to the impoundment of your account. So you are bound to obey. Government and organizations keep declaring public holidays for their workers to do all these. Elsewhere, people are begged to patronise the banks but here, the people are coerced and tortured to surrender their money to the banks.
Quite often, the vehicle licensing authorities impose their own conditions for a rip-off. They just toy around with the validity period of the driver’s license and ask everybody to come and register and pay whatever “fine” they impose. See what they did with the vehicle registration recently? They said they changed the method of registration. All they did was to transpose the registration centre with the serial number – they changed AJ 999 BEN to BEN 999 AJ – and that’s what we must pay another N10,000 for! With all the registration and re-registration, cars are still snatched with reckless abandon.
The tax authorities in Nigeria are not left out. You must also register and obtain their number. They call it the Taxpayer’s Identification Number, TIN. Here, not only must you sweat to pay your tax; but you must first sweat to register for permission to do so. Elsewhere, the tax collector seeks you out wherever you are but here, the burden is on the taxpayer to go to the tax office to register and surrender himself.
We have stopped questioning why we must have fresh voters’ registration every election year. To my father, those voters’ cards have become collector’s items. Occasionally, he would bring them down from the fire place and begin to tell us, “This was the one we used to vote for Zik… we used this one to vote for Awo; this was for Owie and this was for Oronsaye’s election…”
The Professor Attahiru Jega’s registration has been perhaps the most expensive and most tortuous. Government has since lost count of the number of public holidays declared to enable people register and collect their voters’ cards with the attendant loss of man-hour. And just about when we were starting to believe that it is Uhuru, echoes from the various election petitions tribunals indicate otherwise. We are still hearing of places where they set aside the number of registered voters with the cards collected and even aimed at surpassing the total general population!
Every 10 years, we have the population census war with the clear underpinning that revenue sharing and all forms of resource allocation are done on the basis of population. States and Localities struggle to out-register and outdo one another. Multiple registrations become the order of the day. Yet, we wonder why Nigeria remains one nation unable to count its people.
In an attempt to make these registrations less painful, they are now buried under the nebulous euphemism of biometrics.
In the more advanced democracies, superior arrangements have rendered most of these registrations unnecessary. For instance, in the US, they have the Social Security Card. By 1990, the threshold for the issuance of the Card was lowered to one year old; and with new developments, it is now obtainable along with the birth certificate. This single card identifies the American wherever he goes.
In Britain, virtually everything is subsumed under the National Insurance, NI, and the National Health Insurance, NHI, schemes. In these places, the need to keep running around in circles is obviated.
A better way to appreciate the enormity of our self-imposed problem here is that in concrete terms, the sum-total of the waste on these frivolous registrations amount to billions, which could easily defray those unpaid salaries scattered around the country.
At a point, Nigeria must make a bold attempt to rediscover itself. Better is one solid national form of identification than an avalanche of make-shifts!
VANGUARD
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