PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The National I.D. Card Scheme: the Nightmare Worsens

kudugana@yahoo.com

For a government that likes to boast of its credentials as the nemesis of corruption and lack of transparency in places high and low, it was truly amazing how President Obasanjo’s cabinet decided last month to restart the National Identity Card Scheme even as the current one remained inconclusive and mired in a multi-billion Naira scandal.

The ID card scheme is, of course, not the only scandal in town but as a long running case of high class fraud and as a symbol of government’s endemic incompetence, the scheme is truly the one to beat.

As I have pointed out on at least four occasions that I have written about this issue, the ID Card Scheme goes all the way back to 1967, the onset of our civil war that ended in 1970. For security reasons the authorities wanted at that time to identify Igbos who had rejected rebel leader Emeka Ojukwu’s call to return to the East. Some government senior officials and the then influential New Nigerian argued that that would amount to discriminating against the Igbos and should, for that reason, be discarded. The authorities obliged.

Nothing was heard of the scheme again until 1976 when General Obasanjo became Head of State following the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed in February. This time the scheme was broadened to provide a manual identity card to all adult Nigerians. It was also to be handled by the Department of National Civil Registration (DNCR) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

For three years the idea remained in the planning stage until the twilight of Obasanjo’s regime in1979. He launched it a few months before he handed over power to elected president, Alhaji Shehu Shagari in October. However, only General Obasanjo himself and a few government officials and some staff of Dodan Barracks, Lagos, the then seat of government, got the ID cards.

From the time President Shagari took over onwards, the scheme seemed to have turned into an avenue for self-aggrandisement and distribution of patronage by civilian and military administrations alike. Shagari’s administration was the first major culprit. First, the scheme was taken away from the DNCR and awarded to a chieftain of the ruling National Party of Nigeria, who, in turn, sub-contracted it to two U.S. companies, one to finance, the other to implement.

This was in 1980. A year later, the contractor failed to perform. The contract was then cancelled and advertised. Strangely it was re-awarded in 1982 to the same sub-contractors that had failed to deliver. This time, the contract sum was N56 million, up from the original N10 million.

The new contractors were given 18 months to deliver. Twenty-four months later, there were still no identity cards. Meantime the cost had gone up to N90 million.

By this time President Shagari had been overthrown. The regime of General Muhammadu Buhari that had taken over in December 1983 showed no interest in the scheme and indeed cancelled it. That would probably have been the end of the matter, but then Buhari was in turn overthrown by General Ibrahim Babangida who decided to re-visit it.

Babangida’s regime became the second major culprit of the dubious scheme. Throughout his regime’s eight years, the scheme went through contract variations after contract variations and yet in the end no identity cards were delivered.

In mid-1991, I anchored a cover story on the scheme for the defunct Citizen magazine. In the course of doing the story, I interviewed just about every minister of internal affairs that had handled the scheme, from Alhaji M.D. Yusuf during Obasanjo’s time, through Alhaji Bello Maitama Yusuf during Shagari’s time, to Major-General A.B. Mamman, the minister at the time Citizen did the story. I also interviewed representatives of the contracting firm and senior staff of the DNCR. Again, I interviewed senior civil servants at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The inevitable conclusion from all these interviews combined with visits to sites of the scheme in Abuja and other places was that the scheme had become a bottomless pit of the Naira. Indeed we characterized it in our editorial as “a national disgrace, if not a national nightmare.”

When President Obasanjo revisited the scheme in 2000, not long after taking over from General Abdulsalami Abubakar, he complicated matters even more by politicizing it. Apparently eager to implement the Afenifere agenda of changing the demographic structure of the country in favour of the South, the president made the possession of the ID card a condition for the vote in the 2003 general elections. The assumption - a foolish assumption as it turned out when the preliminary results of the exercise were announced several months later by the Ministry of Internal Affairs - was that such a scheme would expose the numerical superiority of the North over the South as a colonial fraud. The result of the exercise still gave an edge to the North.

In the end, President Obasanjo relented on his insistence on the possession of the I.D. Card as a condition for voting in 2003 largely because everyone could see that it was simply impossible, even with the most competent government, to deliver the ID card to all adult Nigerians before the elections.

Because of the president’s determination to see the scheme through from 2000, many Nigerians wondered if he would not be the one to break the long running jinx it had become. I, for one, was skeptical. “The question,” I said on these pages on June 20, 2001, “is, can President Obasanjo break the jinx? I certainly hope and pray that he does, but I am not optimistic. The ID card scheme is merely symptomatic of the attitude of the Nigerian elite, political, bureaucratic, military, or business elite, towards public trust. He sees public trust as something to be manipulated for personal gain rather than something to uphold.”

After the announcement last month of the decision by the Federal Executive Council to re-start the ID card scheme all over again, it is obvious that my skepticism was not unjustified. Now, we are told, without any reference to the inconclusive status of the current scheme, that a brand new scheme is necessitated by the progress in information technology which allows for the storage of personal data in a chip on an ID Card. Clearly this is convincing; storing information in chips was not just discovered or invented yesterday.

The government’s rationalization for restarting the scheme can only make Nigerians even more cynical about the federal government’s claim of accountability and about its crusade against corruption and lack of transparency in governance.

As PUNCH said in its editorial on the subject in its edition of April 13, there are suspicions that the newly announced scheme “may be no more than a fresh avenue to fund the coming elections or compensate political cronies.” Or in the words of The Guardian of April 18, “The ID Card scheme has become a major conduit pipe for draining national resources and the corrupt enrichment of government officials.”

Between 1979, when the scheme took off properly, and last month’s announcement of a new scheme, it has been one scandal after another. The latest was the docking in court of three former internal affairs ministers and some senior civil servants in the ministry, a former secretary-general of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, and a representative of the contractors, for fraud in the sum of 214 million dollars which is over 27 billion Naira. That case, as far as I know, is still pending.

Worse still, three years after President Obasanjo awarded the contract for the scheme to Sagem in the sum of 300 million dollars, or roughly 38 billion Naira, and three years after the president re-launched it in February 2003, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians are yet to receive their ID cards. In many cases, impostors have collected ID cards that were not their’s. In other cases the personal data of the subjects have been mixed up.

Without resolving the court case and remedying all these flaws in the scheme, the government simply told Nigerians last month that it has decided to embark on another ID card scheme. It is as if we are back to those bad old days in the early 70’s when government told Nigerians that money was not an object but how to spend it.

The ID card, as I said on these pages on February 26, 2003, may be desirable as a check on the accuracy of our headcounts but it was never really necessary. Many countries in the world have conducted successful headcounts without national ID cards. Then, of course, the ID card that is foolproof as evidence of a citizen’s personal identification is yet to be invented and probably never will.

By politicizing the National ID Card scheme and by throwing so much good money at it after bad – President Obasanjo alone has spent more than 10 times what all previous administrations have spent on the scheme - the Obasanjo administration seems to have become a worse perpetrator of the nightmare Nigerians have endured under the scheme in the last 39 years than the Shagari and the Babangida regimes combined.

Fortunately, it is never too late to end a nightmare. In 2001, I suggested the president’s best bet of ending the ID card nightmare was to cut our losses on the scheme, and run. Given the result, no matter how mixed, that has been achieved since he relaunched it in 2003, it is probably no longer wise to cut and run.

Instead, the current contractors must be forced to deliver on their contracts. And for a regime that likes touting its anti-corruption credentials, the Obasanjo administration should see through the pending court case on the scheme.

Whatever happens, the president should jettison the idea of a fresh ID card scheme when the book on the current scheme remains far from closed.