Before there was NIMC there was a queue. And then another queue. And then another.
To open a bank account a Nigerian filled a form with full name, parents' names, date of birth, address, employer, signature, and a passport photograph. To get a driver's licence the same form, plus a thumbprint and an eye test. To register as a voter the same form, plus ten fingerprints and a facial capture. To get an international passport the same form, plus a sworn affidavit of age. To obtain a tax identification number the same form. To buy a SIM card, from 2011 onwards, the same form plus a fresh biometric capture at the dealer's table. To receive the Bank Verification Number the Central Bank introduced in 2014, the same form plus another set of ten fingerprints and another facial capture at the bank counter — even if the customer had already enrolled with NIMC, INEC, FRSC and Immigration. Every federal agency that issued anything ran its own register, kept its own biometric kit, paid its own contractor, charged its own fee, and refused to recognise anyone else's data. A 2018 KPMG review counted at least thirteen separate federal databases holding overlapping biographical and biometric records of the same Nigerians, none of them speaking to the others.
That duplication was not an accident. It was the institutional history of Nigerian identity.
The earliest attempt was the Department of National Civic Registration (DNCR), set up by the Shagari administration in 1979 under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The DNCR was meant to issue a national identity card to every Nigerian aged 18 and above. It took fifteen years to award its first contract — to the French firm Sagem in 1996 — and another nine years to deliver a card. By the time enrolment closed in 2005 the Department had issued roughly 37 million paper laminated cards at a reported cost north of \$200 million, with no central digital database behind them and no Nigerian agency that accepted the card as proof of anything. The DNCR card did not get you a passport, did not open a bank account, did not register a SIM. It was a piece of plastic.
Parallel to the DNCR sat the Federal Road Safety Corps (1988), running its own driver-licence register; the Independent National Electoral Commission (1998), running its own voter roll with biometrics from 2010; the Nigeria Immigration Service, running passport biometrics; the Federal Inland Revenue Service, issuing tax numbers; the National Pension Commission, holding pension biometrics from 2004; and, after 2011, the Nigerian Communications Commission's SIM registration database. None of them trusted any of the others.
The 2007 National Identity Management Commission Act was drafted to end this. It abolished the DNCR, transferred its records to a new commission, and gave NIMC three statutory jobs: enrol every Nigerian and legal resident; issue a unique 11-digit National Identification Number (NIN) that would follow a person for life; and harmonise the other federal registers under the NIN as the single anchor identifier. Section 27 made it an offence, from a date to be appointed by the Minister, to apply for a passport, open a bank account, register for tax, vote, get a driver's licence, or buy land without quoting the NIN. The penalty clause was real. The 'date to be appointed' was not.
Thirteen years passed. By the end of 2019, NIMC had enrolled roughly 38 million Nigerians out of an estimated population north of 200 million. The Commission's own audit reports complained of underfunding, equipment failures, and a parallel federal habit of standing up new registers — BVN at the CBN in 2014, the INEC biometric voter roll, the FRSC driver database — that duplicated NIMC's mandate and starved it of fees. Banks ignored Section 27. So did INEC. So did Immigration, which kept issuing passports against birth certificates and 'letters of identification' from local-government chairmen.
For those thirteen years the NIN existed as a law without a gate. It was voluntary in practice, mandatory only on paper, and most Nigerians had never heard of it — while the same Nigerians stood in the same queues filling the same forms and pressing the same ten fingers into the same scanners at every federal agency that demanded proof of who they were. That was the inheritance the Buhari administration walked into when, in December 2020, it decided to bolt the NIN onto something every Nigerian already owned — a SIM card.