Hadiza Dagabana, General Manager Legal Service. National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), says Nigerians should always follow due process and report cases of extortion while trying to collect their National Identity Cards to curb fraud.

Dagabana told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) at the NIMC office in Abuja that the report circulating that the Commission demands money for collection of ID-cards is ‘fake news’.

The director general said that the Commission was established by law to carry out identity management, and therefore, advised Nigerians who have registered to go and obtain their ID-cards free of charge.

According to her, we have currently established 164 locations for the national identity management registration processes at both Federal and State levels.

“The standard is to have an enrollment centre within a population of 50,000 people, when we enroll the first thing a person is issued is that National Identification Number that is mandatory for us to issue and we issued it free of charge”.

“We do not charge for enrolment and issuance of national identification number, we have received reports from some locations and schools where some individuals have approached them asking them to pay a thousand or five hundred or five thousands naira for them to enroll their students that is not from NIMC”.

“We would encourage any person that is approached to pay money to please write to the DG NIMC and submit those complaints or go our website and report those kind of incident and it would be dealt with”.

“We will encourage Nigerians that were approached to make sure they take information of those people may be their picture, number or verifiable contact number of those people, so that we will be able to trace those persons and act accordingly”.

“Nigerians also should support us and be our watchdog to make sure that we deliver our services according to the rules and regulations of the land. We have a small bureau that we are printing, as I am telling you now we have over 700,000 cards that are lying down in our offices that Nigerians had not come to claim”.

“Because when you register with us you provide a contact number and email address we have spent money sending SMS to the numbers that were provided for us,” she said.

“We have spent money sending SMS to the numbers that were provided for us. Some people have moved, some have changed their numbers, they have not come to our database to update their numbers, so how are we going to know that you have changed your numbers?’’ she said.

Dagabana, therefore, called on such persons to visit any NIMC office closest to them to request for a card transfer form, which they would fill and submit to the State Coordinator or Local Government Supervisor for processing.

The Acting DG also said it is not mandatory for any person to go about with national ID-cards, saying the world had gone past people carrying cards.

She noted that people should always take note of their National Identification Number (NIN), which is the number encrypted on the card to avoid problem of any sort.

Dagabana said the commission has also made its services easy for everyone to access; verification on our data-base is trapped and authenticated.

“If you want to re-issue or retrieve your NIN, dial *346# with the phone number you gave us on your data base with just N20, you will get back your identification number.”

She said that the Commission is partnering with other development-based organisations to promote funding of digital identity management.

She listed the World Bank and European Union (UN) to be among other key development agencies under the UN Sustainable Development Goals assisting the commission.

“Identity management is one of the key points in development goals, and we are working towards achieving targets,” she said.