President Muhammadu Buhari has collected his National Identity Card from the the National Identity Management Commission.
The commission on October 14, Wednesday, vowed that Nigerians who are yet to pick up theirs would do so in 90 days’ time.
Chris Onyemenem, the director-general of the commission, who made the brief ceremony in Buhari’s office, blamed the postponement of the supplying of the cards on the inability of the contractors to perform.
Onyemenam revealed that the database of about 20 million Nigerians had already been captured.
He said: “We did two things. First we demonstrated to the President how the national identification number can be used to confirm the identity of an individual even if the person is not present. That is the reason why we said the identification number is a security number. Because if you have access to our data base, you can confirm the identity of an individual.
“Secondly we presented the electronic card to the president and we demonstrated to him how it will be taken round. This is one Rome that was not built in a day, slow and steady with the help of harmonization and integration. We are getting rapidly far more than we ever did before, in trying to unite our data base, and I demonstrated that.”
Before the presentation of the card to leader of the nation, Onyemenam and the officials of the commission took time out to activate the electronic personal identity and the security around the card as well as the payment solution.
Buhari collected his ID card two months after the capture of his data.
