President Bola Tinubu has officially issued a direct mandate to the National Identity Management Commission, instructing the agency to ensure that every single Nigerian citizen is successfully enrolled within the country’s comprehensive national identity database before the end of 2026. This aggressive policy push represents a major step forward in the administration's overarching strategy to establish a modernized, digital governance framework across the West African nation.
The stringent presidential directive was publicly disclosed by the Director-General and Chief Executive Officer of the commission, Abisoye Coker-Odusote, during a featured live appearance on the prominent Channels Television program, Sunday Politics. According to the agency chief, the Federal Government is rapidly intensifying its nationwide operational efforts to scale up the capabilities of the national identity management system and successfully capture millions of individual Nigerians who have not yet been registered within the federal database.
Providing a detailed statistical update on the current scale of the database, Coker-Odusote stated that the commission has already managed to successfully register and enroll an impressive total of 137,371,080 Nigerians. While she proudly described this current data milestone as a highly significant achievement in the historical trajectory of the country’s identity management infrastructure, she simultaneously emphasized that the presidency remains firmly determined to ensure that no single citizen is left uncounted or excluded from the state apparatus.
The agency head went on to explain that the specific presidential mandate requires the commission to shift its operational focus away from being concentrated primarily within major urban metropolitan centers. Instead, registration personnel are now required to take biometric enrollment equipment directly into deep rural communities and grassroots settlements across all localized sectors of the country.
Detailing the exact timeline handed down by the executive branch, she explained that the commission is now legally mandated by the President to go directly down to the local community level and register every single citizen. She explicitly stated that the President has given the organization until the very end of this year to ensure that they systematically capture every individual Nigerian.
To successfully achieve this ambitious national goal, the commission head noted that her team is actively developing and deploying new operational strategies designed to make the biological data collection process vastly more accessible, particularly for individuals residing in highly remote, structurally isolated, and historically underserved rural areas.
As a primary component of the logistical efforts required to satisfy the government's deadline, the commission has formalized strategic partnerships with various relevant global and domestic organizations under the umbrella of the World Bank-backed Identification for Development initiative. This internationally supported program is specifically structured to help developing nations strengthen their foundational identity systems while drastically improving everyday public access to legally verified identification.
Coker-Odusote clarified that this high-level international collaboration is fully expected to provide critical institutional support for the planned mass enrollment drive, significantly upgrade the agency's overall data collection infrastructure, and provide the technical capacity necessary to reach the remainder of the population within the tight timeframe.
The nationwide identity management drive continues to stand as a cornerstone of the Federal Government’s broader digital transformation and economic modernization agenda. State authorities firmly believe that maintaining a truly complete, accurate national identity database will fundamentally optimize public access to vital government social services, dramatically strengthen national security frameworks, drive broader financial inclusion across poor demographics, and vastly improve the precision of macroeconomic national planning.
Over the course of the past few years, the government has consistently accelerated its policy of mandating the integration of the National Identification Number with a wide array of vital public and private utilities. These integrated areas notably include consumer telecommunications lines, commercial banking systems, international passport issuance, and federal social intervention welfare programs, all functioning as part of a concerted national effort to create a fully unified and secure identity matrix for all Nigerians.
