The House of Representatives has faulted the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) for contracting foreign firms to enroll Nigerians into the National Identity Management Data Bank.

The Green Legislative Chamber observed that contracting the capturing of data of Nigerians in the Diaspora to foreign companies exposed sensitive information about the nation’s citizens to aliens.

The Chairman House Committee on Diaspora, Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, made this observation Wednesday when the Director General of the Commission, Abdul-Aziz Aliyu appeared before the Committee to defend the 2020 budget.

The Committee Chairman maintained that the claim by NIMC that it reduced the information of Nigerians in diaspora, means the mandate of the Commission has been defeated

Akande-Sadipe said, “Nigerian embassies all over the world already have desks that work with Nigerians in Diaspora, one of them is immigration. Why have you not partnered with immigration to provide this service of the data capture for NIMC?

“But instead NIMC has exposed Nigerians citizens abroad to private companies to capture very sensitive information. It is a national security issue and we the committee on diaspora based on the complaints need to table the matter today, to have them resolved urgently.

“So, if this project is to be effective, the data you captured in Nigeria must be the same data you captured for Nigerians in diaspora. Before you reduced that information, a lot of Nigerians refused to get registered because of the sensitivity of the data you are gathering which you sub-contracted to an outside agency.

“We want to know the procurement process you went through in selecting the companies that you use today. We will like to know how many those companies are, who they are and what they have captured. We will like to know our diaspora information that is in the hand if the third party. And we will like you to justify in details why you are using private agents”.

The Director General had earlier lamented that NIMC did not have the capacity to capture all Nigerians due to the paucity of funds, adding that the Commission has 1,000 registration centres whereas, it needs a minimum of 4,000 registration centres to capture more Nigerians.

Speaking further on the issue of contracting capturing of data of Nigerians to private companies, Abdul-aziz said the contract was not done through Public Private Partnership (PPP) as observed by the Committee, but was done under licencing approach. (Business Day)

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