Telecom subscribers have opposed the plan by the Federal Government to introduce a suite of digital tokens to enhance the verification of the National Identity Number (NIN), effective January next year.
\nAccording to the Federal Government, the digital token consisting 16 alphabets and numbers will be accepted for third-party verification, instead of the 11-digit NIN.
\nThe development has been greeted with mixed reactions from Nigerians.
\nHowever, the President, National Association of Telecom Subscribers (NATS), Adeolu Ogunbanjo, said the move was currently uncalled for, and should not be implemented without proper consultation with stakeholders.
\nHe said, \u201cWhy can\u2019t the FG engage stakeholders before coming up with this plan? It is a serious policy and they didn\u2019t even engage stakeholders. Why can\u2019t we do that?
\n\u201cUntil they discuss with all relevant stakeholders, and we look at the merits and demerits; they can\u2019t impose this on us\u201d.
\nOgunbanjo recalled that the development was coming barely a year after the Federal Government mandated citizens to link their SIMs to their NINs within a short period, forcing many Nigerians to besiege registration centres.
\nAccording to him, \u201cI do not know why the FG is always rushing things on its citizens, remember when they were also going to start the SIM-NIN linkage, it was announced in a hurry too.
\n\u201cWhy is this government rushing its citizens without proper enlightenment? Nobody knows what this V-NIN is all about, they are coming up with it this month and they want to implement it next month. They must start educating the citizenry first.
\n\u201cWe are not sure if the Federal Government doesn\u2019t have an agenda with all these things. This is because we now have about five or six different means of national identification”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Telecom subscribers have opposed the plan by the Federal Government to introduce a suite of digital tokens to enhance the verification of the National Identity Number (NIN), effective January next year. According to the Federal Government, the digital token consisting 16 alphabets and numbers will be accepted for third-party verification, instead of the 11-digit NIN. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-icttelecom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=283781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283787,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283781\/revisions\/283787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=283781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=283781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=283781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}