PEOPLE

PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The National I.D. Card Project: The nightmare continues

When the National Identity Card project finally took off on February 18 this year after five or six false starts going all the way back to 1967, it seemed quite in order for President Obasanjo’s government to congratulate itself for bringing to an end what had been a financial and administrative nightmare for the country.

For a quick recap of the history of this nightmare, the I.D. Card project started in 1967 when General Yakubu Gowon’s government contemplated issuing I.D. cards to Igbos who had rejected rebel leader Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu’s call to them to return to the East, prelude to his declaration of Biafra.

Then a few bombs went off in Lagos in the early days of the civil war and suspicions fell on the Igbos who remained behind – thus the idea of giving them I.D. cards to monitor their movements. However, some key government officials and the New Nigerian, then a virtual oracle of the government, thought the idea was discriminatory and advised against it. The government eventually heeded the advice and dropped it.

Nearly ten years later in 1976, General Olusegun Obasanjo who had succeeded his assassinated boss, General Murtala Mohammed, revisited the project, but this time for general application. It remained on the drawing board until late 1979 when it was finally executed by the Department of National Civic Registration, under the ministry of Internal Affairs, on the eve of Obasanjo’s departure. However, the execution was only partial; only a handful of senior government officials, including the general, got their I.D. cards which were done manually.

Between the 1979 partial implementation and the last one on February 18, there were at least four false starts, each preceded by contract variations. These were in 1980 and 1982 under President Shehu Shagari. The third false start was in 1985 after General Ibrahim Babangida overthrew General Muhammadu Buhari who had cancelled the contract entered into by Shagari whom he had overthrown in 1983. The last false start was in May 1999 on the eve of General Abdulsalami Abubakar’s departure as the last military ruler before the current democratic (?) dispensation.

Between October 1979 and last February, the cost of the project escalated from about 10,000,000 Naira to over 30 billion – excluding, that is, the current award which has cost the tax payer another 30 billion or so. Clearly the project had become, as I said in the last article I wrote on it on February 26, “a perpetual conduit pipe for self-enrichment” by both the contractors and government officials handling the project.

When I wrote the article I gave it the title “The National I.D. Card Project: Dubious past, uncertain future”. That the project had a dubious past was pretty obvious; there can be no any other description, except of course in stronger language, for a project that had taken over 27 years to implement – not counting the 1967 attempt - and had cost the tax payer over 30 billion Naira and yet had produced practically no result.

As for its uncertain future, I was concerned that President Obasanjo’s introduction of politics into the project late in 2000, could hardly guarantee the universal acceptability necessary for it to be of any use.

The reader will probably recall that in reviewing the project, the president decreed that the citizen’s exercise of his voting right will be conditional upon the possession of the I.D. card. This was clearly in submission to the demand by Afenifere, the Yoruba cultural umbrella led by Chief Abraham Adesanya, for the project’s implementation as a condition for Yoruba participation in the 2003 elections. For the Afenifere, the project had apparently become the only way to confirm its belief that the numerical superiority of the North vis-à-vis the South in general, and of the Hausa/Fulani vis-à-vis the Yoruba, in particular, had always been mere fiction. Chief Adesanya, himself, had once said the North made up its numbers by counting its cows, goats and chicken as humans.

Naturally, the North objected, not to the project as such as its enthusiasts propagated, but to its politicization by Obasanjo in apparent submission to Afenifere’s demand. Those who objected to the linking of the project to the vote, pointed out that if nothing else, it was impossible to complete it ahead of this year’s general elections, given the sheer logistics involved.

President Obasanjo went ahead at break-neck speed regardless, with the predictable fiasco that befell the project in the first several days of its implementation. The hidden agenda behind the president’s new-found zeal for its implementation apparently blinded the government to the need for its reappraisal and for adequate preparation to avoid the mistakes and colossal financial waste of the past. One obvious result of the rushed implementation of the project was that few people knew about it and fewer still knew where to register. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of this public ignorance about the project was Chief Adesanya himself, who said in an interview with The Comet three days before the registration exercise that he didn’t know where to register. “For example, as I am here”, he told The Comet (February 15), “I don’t even know where I am going for my own registration”.

Despite this admission, Chief Adesanya still went on to describe the February 18 exercise as the dawn of the era of certainty about Nigeria’s population. The I.D. card project, he said, will enable us to “know, more than before, the real population of this country”. The I.D. card, he added, will stop illegal entries into the country and will also stop criminals abroad from parading themselves as Nigerians.

Those who objected to the I.D. card project, he said, did so because it was difficult, indeed impossible, to have two I.D. cards at the same time. “You can only have one. So that will expose whatever people have been doing to cheat one part of the country or the other”, he said.

Really? I, for one, found it hard to see wherefrom Chief Adesanya got this near-absolute confidence in the I.D. card, especially given his own admission in the same interview that Nigerians are past masters at forgery. “Anything that comes to Nigeria”, he said, “people try to forge it. There may be forgery of all this, I don’t know”.

Since the bribery scandal surrounding the project surfaced early this month, I have been wondering if Chief Adesanya and other I.D. card enthusiasts still think it is the only anti-dote to the crises that have attended our headcounts to date. For, if a corrective mechanism can be so riddled with so much bribery and corruption, as we are now told the I.D. card project is, it is only legitimate to ask questions about its usefulness.

I suspect also that since the ministry of internal affairs released the preliminary results of the registration exercise in May, Chief Adesanya and the other I.D. card enthusiasts may be wondering if the whole exercise has not boomeranged against their agenda. For, as a story in The Guardian of May 15 pointed out, the North has maintained its lead in population over the South. The story, by Clifford Ndujihe, a senior political reporter with the paper, was headlined “Disparity here and there, North maintains lead in population”.

Back to the recent revelations of bribery and corruption involving several senior officials of the internal affairs ministry, it must be pointed out here that there is widespread cynicism about the timing of the revelations and also about the level of those involved. Many people believe the revelations were timed less to root out corruption than to impress our Commonwealth V.I.Gs (very important guests), including Queen Elizabeth, as to the president’s commitment to fighting corruption. Those with inside knowledge of the affair say that the bribery scandal surfaced as long as two years ago when the Head of Service, Alhaji Ahmed Yayale, reported to the president an attempt by Sagem, the French contractors, to bribe him with tens of thousand of dollars. Sagem eventually edged out the initially more favoured American company, Chams, by reportedly bribing its way through.

The surprise then was that it took the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, probably acting at the behest of the presidency, such a long time to reveal the scandal. It was also surprising that no one in the president’s kitchen cabinet whom General T.Y. Danjuma recently described as a cult, has been named in the scandal, given the widespread notion about how powerless even ministers are in influencing the president’s decisions compared to the members of the kitchen cabinet.

The chances then are that the I.D. Card scandal may be the opening of the Pandora’s box. However, whether or not it opens any box at all, there are at least two lessons to learn from it.

First, bribery and corruption have no tribe, no region and no religion. This is pretty obvious even to the most obtuse mind. Yet some of the most brilliant minds we have in this country, notably Chief Richard Akinjide who once told a newspaper that corruption is ingrained in the Northerner, continue to peddle the nonsense that only people from certain sections of this country and subscribing to certain beliefs, are corrupt. If any one had any doubt that such beliefs are nonsensical, the cast of the characters involved in the I.D. card scandal, a cast which cuts across the tribes, regions and religions of this country, should dispel those doubts.

Second, and more importantly, President Obasanjo should know that his insistence in rushing the implementation of many of his projects and policies has aroused widespread suspicions about his motives. Whether it is the I.D. card project or his monetization policy or his pensions reform, many Nigerians see his attempt to railroad them through the National Assembly, if he can, and right round the Assembly, if he can’t, as an ethnic agenda to corner a disproportionate share of this country’s wealth for a chosen few among his fellow Yorubas before his second term runs out.

This impression may be wrong, but it is something that he has to deal with. In the specific case of the I.D. card project, he can end the long-running nightmare the project has become for Nigerians by simply reviewing its implementation. As some of us have said before, the implementation should have been in phases, and even then after a thorough review of its past. It is still not too late to do so.

I.D. Cards, like any human invention, can never be foolproof. If more security sensitive things like currencies and international passports are not impossible to forge, it is foolish for anyone to think than an I.D. card can not be easily forged. However, along with other documents, I.D.cards can help to cut down on impersonation and other crimes.

For it to be effective, however, it should not be rushed. As some of us have advised before, we can start with issuing it to employees in the public sector and to members of the armed forces, to cut down the incidence of ghost workers and, eventually, ghost pensioners. In time the project can be widened to cover private sector employees and then the self-employed, artisans and the peasantry. Phased out over a period of, say, five years, the project should cover enough of our population to serve as a useful check on the census after the next one.

Unless the president re-examines his approach to the I.D. card project, he would soon discover that the recent revelations about the corruption surrounding it, far from ending it as a long-running nightmare for Nigeria, has only worsened the nightmare.