The Nigerian government has announced that citizens can now request their commercial banks to issue them with a debit card that doubles as their national identity card.
This announcement was made by Prof Isa Pantami, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, who stated that the approval was obtained at a meeting of the Federal Executive Council.
The National Identity Management Commission has allowed banks to print multipurpose debit cards that double as national identity cards.
The card will serve as both a national identity card and a bank card, either Mastercard, Visa or any other kind of card.
The NIMC Act 2007 mandates Nigerians to have a National Identity Number, not necessarily a printout card, but demands for cards have swelled nonetheless.
To ease the difficulty, NIMC has partnered with the Central Bank of Nigeria to print the card along with either a Mastercard or Visa card, without any additional costs to citizens.
The bank will need to connect to the NIMC through their database to verify the person’s details, which must be in tandem with the record in the NIMC database.
The Minister also announced that FEC approved a memo proposing the deployment of an automated system to integrate NINs with individual SIM cards, which would consolidate the implementation of the NIN-SIM linkage.
Article updated 3 weeks ago. Content is written and modified by multiple authors.
