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President Bola Tinubu has directed Nigeria’s National Identity Management Commission to enroll every citizen in the country’s identity database by the end of 2026, even as more than 137 million people, roughly half to two-thirds of the population, remained unregistered as of this weekend, the agency’s director-general said.
Abisoye Coker-Odusote, NIMC’s director-general and chief executive, disclosed the target on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics program. “The President has given us till the end of this year to make sure that we capture every single Nigerian,” she said.
Coker-Odusote said Nigeria’s actual population remains uncertain: some estimates put it at roughly 200 million, while others put the figure as high as 230 million or 250 million. She said the commission had enrolled 137,371,080 Nigerians in the National Identification Number database as of Sunday evening, and that the completed enrollment exercise would itself help settle the population question, since the government currently has no more precise way to count its citizens than the estimates in circulation today.
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Enrollment numbers have grown quickly this year. NIMC reported 117.36 million people registered as of February 2025 and 123.9 million by October of that year; the total passed 136 million in early July, an increase of more than 12 million in eight months, before climbing to more than 137 million within the past week alone. Even at that accelerated pace, the gap between the current total and even the most conservative population estimate leaves tens of millions of people to be registered before the December deadline.
To accelerate the campaign, Coker-Odusote said NIMC has expanded enrollment beyond local government offices into wards and communities, partnering with private front-end enrollment agents under the World Bank-backed Identification for Development project. Those agents are private citizens the commission has hired specifically to register people at the community level, she said, an arrangement it has leaned on to reach underserved rural areas.
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The enrollment push follows Tinubu’s signing of the National Identity Management Commission Act 2026 into law on June 26, replacing the commission’s original 2007 statute. The new law cements the National Identification Number as the country’s foundational identity credential, required for banking, passport applications, tax filings, pensions, land transactions and consumer credit, and enshrines a “one person, one identity” policy. It also raises penalties for identity theft, duplicate registrations and unauthorized access to identity data, expands NIMC’s power to investigate identity-related offenses, and designates the commission as the root certificate authority for Nigeria’s national digital infrastructure and public key encryption system.
Nigeria has long relied on a patchwork of separate identification systems — bank verification numbers issued by the Central Bank, voter cards issued by the electoral commission, driver’s licenses and tax identification numbers among them — with no single credential recognized across all of them. Officials have said consolidating those systems under the NIN is intended to reduce fraud in social intervention programs, widen access to formal banking and support planning that has long been complicated by uncertainty over the country’s true population.
Coker-Odusote said the commission’s biometric system now blocks duplicate identities automatically, unlike the process it replaced. Under the previous system, she said, a duplicate registration could enter the database before being detected later; the current system flags a repeat entry the moment it matches an existing record, generating a single valid identity while routing the duplicate into what she called a deduplication bucket for invalidation. Fingerprint and facial-recognition checks, she said, make it nearly impossible for one person to hold more than one identity. She cited telecommunications companies as an example of the system already in use: carriers now capture facial biometrics during SIM registration and match them against NIMC’s database in real time before issuing a new line.
Budget and Economic Planning Minister Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, who has separately welcomed the new law, said its ultimate impact would depend on execution rather than passage alone, adding that success would rest on “effective implementation and the tangible benefits delivered to citizens.”
With roughly five and a half months left before the president’s deadline, NIMC has not said how many additional enrollment centers or front-end partners it plans to deploy to close the remaining gap, nor whether it will publish interim progress figures before the year’s end.
