UNWIELDY, disorganised and vulnerable to security breaches, Nigeria’s data landscape needs to be streamlined. Thankfully, it seems the government has finally realised the dangers of proliferation of data. For some time, public and private organisations have been coercing the citizens into registering on their databases. Realising the noxious trend, the Federal Government has established an inter-ministerial committee on the harmonisation of data collection and management. This is a step in the right direction, but the policy should be strategically implemented.
The initiative, being coordinated by the Ministry of Finance, is to put an end to the duplication of biometric data, which is expanding at a dizzying pace. For one, the replication of data is a costly enterprise. In the public service alone, several Ministries, Departments and Agencies have been capturing the biometric data of citizens.
Rightly, one of the motives of the MDAs is to eliminate “ghost workers.” For the Nigeria Immigration Service, biometric registration is a mandatory requirement for obtaining a Nigerian passport. To acquire a driving licence, the Federal Road Safety Commission captures the data of applicants. This is similarly done by the Independent National Electoral Commission for the voter card. Late last year, the NIS stated that no citizen would be able to acquire or renew a passport without enrolling with the National Identity Management Commission (for the national identity card).
Although the banking industry had earlier upgraded the system digitally to the 10-digit Nigerian Uniform Bank Account Number a few years ago, the authorities have also mandated the public to enrol for the Bank Verification Number, a biometric platform without which any customer cannot transact banking business nationwide. Earlier, the Nigerian Communications Commission, in conjunction with the telecom companies, had embarked on the biometric registration of subscribers. In Lagos and some other states, biometric registration of residents is being implemented.
Yet, not all this has been of much help, especially in terms of improving security and curbing financial fraud. In the telecoms sector, SIM Card registration is still a complicated puzzle for the police in identifying kidnappers, fraudsters and armed robbers, who use telephone to demand ransom and mask calls and for other unwholesome crimes.
Neither has the BVN significantly reined in financial crimes. Court testimonies in the ongoing trials of some public officials, who operate bank accounts without BVNs, underscore the weakness of the legal environment that makes it prone to abuse. Likewise, the FRSC had promised that its latest number plates would reduce crime and car theft. It is a moot point this has been achieved.
Data proliferation is highly prone to hacking by tech geeks. They can breach the system; steal vital information about individuals and businesses. Even with its well-secure system, the National Health Service in Britain was hit by hackers in May 2017. Doctors who logged on to their computers found a padlock. The hackers demanded £300 to be paid into a bit-coin account as ransom. The ransomware attack disrupted the services of 48 trusts (hospitals) in England and 13 in Scotland; and spread to 150 countries, affecting 200,000 victims.
Financially, every form of duplication entails a heavy, unnecessary cost. Apart from individual telecoms operators, the NCC budgeted N6.1 billion for SIM Card registration in 2010. The Director-General of the NIMC, Aliyu Aziz, said in December 2016 that the agency needed N20 billion to harmonise the data of Nigerians with the different MDAs. Similarly, the Central Bank of Nigeria and the commercial banks bore the financial brunt of the BVN project. In 2017, an independent survey by cyber security experts put the national loss from data duplication by just 16 MDAs at N610 billion (or $2 billion) annually.
Therefore, the inter-ministerial committee set up by Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, has its work cut out. At present, it is cumbersome for the security agencies to retrieve information from telecoms operators using the SIM Card of suspects, which are deemed personal. The committee needs to activate a legal framework to make it seamless for security agents to extract the data of crime suspects.
A porous cyber environment raises several concerns: the disclosure or access to such data by unauthorised criminals and business outfits, alteration of data, and violation of fundamental rights and liberty issues on privacy that comes with storage by different MDAs and private corporations. This should not be taken lightly. In 2005, Israel suffered this breach when a subcontractor for its Labour and Welfare Ministry stole information from the country’s population registry. There must be legal provisions for citizens to sue for damages when their data is breached.
Properly implemented, data harmonisation enables the business community, academic researchers and security agencies to obtain accurate statistics from one dependable source. Such a base is a rich resource for MDAs to deliver services and empower the intelligence community to monitor terrorists and trans-border crimes.
Research indicates that a harmonised database aids economic planning, can interpret the dynamics of demographics, planning for elections and making population projections. Through an integrated driving licence, medical practitioners can obtain the vital data of a victim of an accident or an armed robbery attack in an emergency by logging on to the harmonised database. To this end, the British Home Office said in January that it would consolidate its biometric databases into one central platform for fingerprints, DNA, and facial imagery by the first quarter of 2019.
According to the law, it is the primary duty of the NIMC to register, maintain and integrate the national database. Therefore, for Nigeria to achieve this daunting task, the inter-ministerial team should focus and weave the project around the NIMC. It should encourage the government to find a sustainable policy to fund the project.
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