When Kano Pillars shared pictures of their new player, homeboy Ahmed Musa, 28, at the training ground flanked by 25-year-old defender Abdullahi Musa, many accused the latter of being older than he claims.
They arguably had fair reasons to doubt as accusations like this are not new. In fact, age falsification in football is so commonplace in Nigeria that it has earned its own moniker: “football age.”
In 2016, ahead of a qualifier match for the Africa U-17 Cup of Nations, 26 players from Nigeria’s Golden Eaglets team were disqualified after they failed MRI scans, suggesting that they were overage.
Far beyond the football field, falsifying age is rampant among job applicants, politicians, and even academics as was the case of Peter Okebukola, a former boss of the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) who used three birth dates interchangeably during his career.
This misrepresentation of biodata has been aided largely by the absence of a national identification system. To address this malaise, former President Jonathan Goodluck launched the new Nigerian national ID card in 2014. The launch followed an existing National Identity Database (NIDB) exercise which began in 2007.
To integrate the two policies, the federal government released an updated policy that required citizens and legal residents to integrate their biometrics-backed national identification number (NIN) with their Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards.
Network providers were thus required to create a Device Management System (DMS) with records of International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), a 15-digit device identifier, to check the use of stolen mobile phones.
Aside from development planning and spurring financial inclusion, the process to link SIMs to NINs, federal officials have reiterated, is to ensure the safety and security of all citizens and legal residents, while also ensuring they all have a unique digital identity.
With financing support of $115 million from the World Bank and an additional $315 million expected from the European Investment Bank and the French Agency, the national ID database targets 148 million enrolments by July 2024.
Sections 27 and 29 of the NIMC Act 2007 provides for the mandatory use of NIN for transactions, including application and issuance of a passport, the opening of personal bank accounts, purchase of insurance policies, voter registration, obtaining credit, among others.
Usage of certain social infrastructure without the number attracts a fine, or an imprisonment of up to 14 years or both.
But marred by extortion and disrupted by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the exercise has captured about 54 million people with the new deadline for obtaining the number now June 30. After that deadline, SIM cards not linked to NIN risk being deactivated, authorities said.
The NIDB will take Nigeria into the league of countries like Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Zambia with mandatory biometric SIM registration laws.
In fact, over 60 countries have adopted the digital identity exercise and are on course to have a national eID scheme.
Controversies
While the integration of the NIN and SIM was going on, the government ordered mobile operators to suspend the sale, registration and activation of new SIM cards as part of its audit of the country’s subscriber registration database.
“We are cracking down on multiple SIM registrations and fraudulent sales carried out by corrupt vendors to facilitate fraud and other dubious activities,” the Nigerian communications commission said in December.
