Need To Harmonise Biometric Data

Early last month, the Nigerian Police
Force introduced the Digital
Biometric Central Motor Registration (BCMR).
Announcing the replacement of the analogue Central Motor Registration (CMR) with the Digital BCMR which kicked off about mid last month, the Force spokesman, CSP Frank Mba said the prevailing security challenges have made the scheme imperative.
The new technology, Mba explained, would tackle terrorism, car theft, kidnapping and other acts of criminality in the country.
Expectedly, the announcement elicited reactions from Nigerians. While the directive to Nigerians to submit themselves for auto-mobile bio-metrics has tended to trivialize and even expose the lack of order in information management in Nigeria, many Nigerians have raised serious objections that should have been attended to. This is moreso as the essential personal data can get into wrong hands and compromise the peace of everyone.
The Tide is aware of the argument in some quarters that apart from one or two of such exercises, the driving force for nearly every agency calling for bio-metrics is the pecuniary benefit in it. This, we hope, is out of it.
Unpleasant as our fondness for multiple registration in this country is, the problem still remains that we do not have an authentic data pool that contains information on all Nigerians.
Apart from the apparent lack of adequate public enlightenment on the scheme before its commencement, Nigerians cannot understand why they should be subjected to such biometrics for virtually everything from National Identification Card to Drivers Licence, SIM registration, International Passport, Voters card, Number plate registration, employers registration, just name it. Even so, more banks and agencies still ask for the same thing.
To many, if the police has not decided to lay mines for motorists to extort them in the guise of the BCMR, they (police) could liaise with such traffic management agencies as the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) to get the needed data to check criminality.
Beyond that however, The Tide thinks that owing to the sensitive nature of the information so volunteered under the BCMR, there ought to have been the harmonization of this data to serve every germane national purpose and not everyone to have his bio-data scattered across many platforms.
As it is, the Federal Government must intervene and stop the auto-mobile biometric capture as it stands to achieve no significant purpose. If the police need the bio-data of anyone, it should access same from a central point.
By now, the Ministry of Interior, the National Planning Commission and the National Bureau of Statistics should have a way forward so as to protect the information of millions of Nigerians and for their safety.
For proper national planning, a dependable data base is most imperative. With such information bank, basic facts like the country’s exact population, unemployed workforce, list of the productive youth, birth and death rates and indeed actual ages of various Nigerians would not be issues for conjecture.
In fact, were such dependable data base in existence, members of the Nigerian Junior National team, the Eaglets would not bring on the nation the shame of claiming ages other than theirs and cause avoidable embarrassment to the nation.
It is perhaps, for the lack of such dependable data base that such easy age-falsification in public service and sports has become a norm, individual states population figures still questionable and national projections subject to individuals’ guesses.
The new biometric policy requirement should, ordinarily be a welcome development only that it adds to the near frequent and annoying duplication of such personal information and this makes a mockery of our seriousness in developing a dependable national data bank. Rather than compound the situation, relevant authorities should strive to harmonize existing data and only update as and when necessary.