In this television interview monitored by Benedict Nwachuckwu, a lawyer, chairman, founder of Grassroots Addressing and Identity Network and a former Postmaster General of Nigeria/ CEO of Nigerian Postal Service, Bisi Adegbuyi, speaks on the controversy regarding the unauthorized website harvesting the personal data of Nigerians. Excerpts:
Where did we get it wrong such that even the national identity card of a serving minister can be bought for N100 online and what do we need to do?
Thank you. Let’s put it in context. Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Apologies to Tiwa Savage. The foundation of this is the philosophy of who? That’s digital identity where that’s addressing how the operationalization of the two concepts towards achieving a robust identity system cannot be compromised. Now we need reforms in Nigeria and what is important is that this is not a time to play any blame game because we need to assist the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) in order to assist ourselves.
Has it been compromised? Maybe. Is it a bad situation? Maybe. Is it incurably bad? Not so. However you recall that Bill Gates met with the President of Nigeria in Saudi Arabia during the World Economic Forum at the sidelines. Don’t take my word for you. Bill Gates said we have been dealing with your identity ecosystem and it is very scattered and we have been discussing with the Minister of Finance and Coordinator of the economy on the latest technology on identity systems, Modular Open Source Identity Platform, which is called MOSIP. It is a modular open source identity platform incubated and developed by the International Institute of Technology Development in Bangalore.
Having been inspired by the overwhelming success, Hada Indian System, the world’s largest end-to-end identity system, 1.2 billion inched and founded an unverifiable addressing system. Therefore I am submitting here today that if you look at the NIMC Act it has covered the area of who. But the other leg which in my view, the last mile and equally important is weird. That is digitally verifiable addresses. So in the course of our conversation, I will highlight or submit on how we can structurally rehabilitate whatever problem we have touching and concerning the alleged compromise.
It’s not my word but what is important is that in order to help NIMC, because identity and address are critical national infrastructure, if we get it right, we will take care of insurgency, unemployment.
I mean the demographic architecture of Nigeria you have the digital natives in the majority. And e-commerce has been projected by the United Nation to grow at an additional 50%. The biggest market for e-commerce in Africa is Nigeria. That’s why we need to get it.
Now recall that anytime a bank appears to be insolvent what the regulator does is to subject it to stress tests. Isn’t it? I mean, that informed CBN’s decision regarding a bank I don’t want to mention. So we just subject the NIMC ecosystem to a stress test. All the names that have been attached to a residential address, those addresses must be verified. And if they come clean, you know this is clean.
They are in South West
No, no, no. I grew up in Ibadan. It is on longitude and latitude. We have now converted SIM by virtue of existing and evolving technologies to come up with digital addressing. I have got 102, 000 000 003 metres by metres grid digital addresses that I want to give to Nigerians. I wanted to do it as a former Postmaster General. But you know Nigeria is always at war with itself. And you know the federal civil service, they constituted bureaucracy. I mean when they got there, they killed it.
“There must be synergy between NIMC and NIPOST. The NIMC supplies the identity number, name, and then NIPOST should be involved in the last mile of digitally verifying those addresses. It’s not rocket science”
Thank you very much for bringing that up because that leads into my next question. So what are the challenges? Is it that the money allocated was not enough. What are the challenges in particular?
NIMC is a microcosm of Nigeria. We love to be working hard in the wrong direction. So, the incumbent Director General (Engr. Abisoye Coker-Odusote), to be fair to her, she has been trying to clean up the register. I mean I know this system so well.
It’s on record that I paid her predecessor in office, the Director General of NIMC at that material time a courtesy visit. I did that three good times with a view to partnering with NIMC. Look NIPOST is a vital national infrastructure that takes care of the last mile. There must be synergy between NIMC and NIPOST. The NIMC supplies the identity number, name, and then NIPOST should be involved in the last mile of digitally verifying those addresses. It’s not rocket science. Don’t forget. I mean Bill Gates is coming with his idea. But can we just do a comparative analysis of the identity ecosystem in other jurisdictions? Alright. The idea of MOSIP was incubated and inspired by the outstanding success of Ada in India. Okay, so MOSIP is open source. It’s not for profit because Bill Gates, Tata and the rest of them have funded the development of the technology. Pretty much like Mayo clinic, arguably the best hospital in the world. Not for profit but here is the problem.
If you are going to copy a system you must also be able to copy the fundamentals of those systems. I mentioned about the world’s largest end-to-end identity system. Without you having your address verified, you are not going to be enrolled in the other ecosystem. The same thing is in South Africa. The same thing is in Egypt, the same thing is in the Philippines. The truth of the matter is that 11 countries are at the various stages of adopting MOSIP. Nigeria has signed a Memorandum of Understanding. But I am submitting with due respect to them that if you don’t have a foundation for that ID system that is verifiable address, physically verifiable, it will fail because it just amounts to building a castle on a shaky foundation. So once we agree that we will subject those names to stress tests normally before you enroll for a name, there’s a column for address, isn’t it? Those addresses must be subjected to digital verification, the software, the technologies. Here I own it. I have what they call MVP. Agile, scalable with full application programme interface. Nigeria spent money on me as a Postmaster General.
I was exposed to several international workshops capacity building. But I wanted to bring back to Nigeria the benefits of the investment. That solution I am talking about won in 2018. Wises World Summit on Information Society, an affiliate of International Telecommunications Union, a specialized agency of UN in category 18 of WIS’ leveraging on ICT to create e-employment at that material time. Because I was the very person to be appointed as Postmaster General from the public sector, the technology was developed by sound Nigeria. So we had them alright but we had to pay for the prototype based on public private partnership the approval limits or rather what. The guy that developed the technology is one of the finest brains. He has a PhD. It was beyond approval limits, so we escalated to the Ministry of Communications. It got killed there. That’s it. Not exactly. I can tell you what happened. You know if people still play in the value team they are still Nigerians.
And I am happy that I am talking to a former Postmaster General because I have always reckoned that NIPOST should be a multi-billion dollar institution in this country. It should be the biggest distributor for e-commerce services. Because NIPOST is about the only government agency in this country, if I am not mistaken that has a point in almost every local government.
After the police, NIPOST is one of the biggest agencies with the largest reach.
How can we bring all these touch points together? How can we bring the BVN data, the NIN data, and the Voter’s Card data points?
I will tell you how to go about that. It is called convergence of data. Yes but before you converge data, it’s like a relay race. If you have a very good guy who is anchoring, your first leg, second leg and you get to the last line which is the NIPOST and the last guy messes up, you’re going to lose the medal. So there must be a multi stake holding or stakeholders approach to it. But really you must clean up the NIMC ecosystem, the identity ecosystem. Once you clean it up and ensure its address is based on any number or name that is not integrated with an address that can be physically verified, an address verification certificate issued should be yanked off the database. At least you know that.
The banks have some of those databases because when you do BVN, even when you open a bank account there’s still some fiscal verification. What are the issues?
They don’t, they don’t. Most times they don’t go to the locals. So because they don’t have the most technology, you know there is software that, I mean banks have called me in the past. We want to do address verification, is it the one that you visit the locals or you just randomly verify addresses. Because I have been involved, the truth of the matter is that compliance officers in banks are making money. They have address verification agents and rather than go to the locals and take the picture of whoever is asking for his address to be verified and immediately uploaded to a designated data centre they hardly do that. Some do it. Again insecurity in the land is another issue.