NIN Enrolment: 98.7 million Nigerians have been issued ID numbers

This significant achievement is a testament to the efforts made by the Nigerian government to promote digital identification and streamline public services. It also pushes Nigeria closer to reaching the World Bank’s target under the Digital Identification for Development (ID4D) project.

According to the project’s provisions, the government must have issued 148 million NIN by June 2024. However, the latest increase in national identity registration doesn’t guarantee the country will hit that figure by 2024.

Nigeria would need to enrol and issue an additional 49.3 million people over the course of the next 13 months and beyond to meet the target, which is less than a year before the deadline. Reaching 148 million by June 2024 may not be possible with the average monthly enrollments of 1 million over the past year.

More on the NIN figures

According to the data from NIMC, as of April 28, 98.7 million identification numbers have been assigned to Nigerians. More specifically, 56 million men, or roughly 56.7%, have NINs, whereas 43.3% of women, or about 42.7 million, have their ID numbers.

The data also revealed Lagos state recorded the highest cumulative enrolment figure with over 10.8 million registrations. This is even as regional figures indicated an almost equal distribution across the North and South.

With 4.9 million men and 3.6 million women, Kano has the second-highest number of issued NINs at 8.6 million. Six million people in Kaduna have it overall—2.6 million women and 3.3 million men. Ogun contains 4.1 million, with 1.9 million women and 2.2 million males. 3.8 million NINs issued in Oyo, with 1.8 million women and 2 million men making up the majority.

In the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja, NIMC has issued 3.3 million NINs, with 1.9 million going to men and 1.4 million going to women. Next is Katsina, where men have 2.37 million and women have 1.3 million, for a total of 3.37 million identity numbers.

Rivers completes the top 10 with 2.96 million NINs, followed by Bauchi with 2.6 million, women with 953,601 and males with 1.7 million identity numbers. In tenth place is Delta, which boasts 2.63 million issued NINs overall—1.3 million for males and 1.2 million for women.

The bottom 10 states, according to NIMC, are Kogi (1.68 million NINs), Akwa Ibom (1.62 million), Imo (1.66 million), Enugu (1.58 million), Yobe (1.5 million), and Taraba (1.43 million). Other identifying numbers are Bayelsa 623,902; Cross River 1.2 million; Ekiti 998,685; and Ebonyi 789,056.

Diasporans not left out of NIN

To increase the quality of service, accuracy, and speed of passport services through the prompt verification of NIN, NIMC had previously claimed that it had reached an agreement on a framework with the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS).

The new arrangement furthers the Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy’s directive to shorten the passport application, renewal, and issuance processes, according to Kayode Adegoke, Head of Corporate Communications at NIMC.

“Consequently, a NIN Verification fee would be charged for each Nigerian passport application for this service.”

The NIMC figures released put the total number of NINs issued to diasporans at 409,408 (Men have 238,027 and women have 171,381). The commission began charging for NIN verification for every Nigerian passport application on April 1 of this year.

Recall that we had earlier reported that the applicable NIN verification charge for Nigeria would be N1,000; for African nations, it would be $5 (or its equivalent in other currencies); and for other nations, it would be $15 (or its equivalent in other nations).

Nigerians to start paying N1,000 NIN fee for international passports from April 1st