Nigeria to use digital tokens instead of identity slips

The Nigerian Government has officially established that it would replace its National Identification Number (NIN) with a suite of digital Tokens.

This was made known by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami at the stakeholders’ workshop on the National Identification Number (NIN) Tokenization Solution organised by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) in Abuja.

FG says the strategy was implemented to ensure privacy protection of individuals during verification transactions and to reduce redundancies during retrieval, usage, transfer, and storage of NIN.

They revealed the tokenisation solution would protect personal identifiable information of the users, stating that the benefits of the virtual NIN are to ensure no third party may carry out any verification, hiding behind a proxy (and without the knowledge of the NIMC, being the Custodian of Identity).

“And also generated Token or Virtual NIN is unintelligent, completely random with no correlation to the NIN and cannot be reverse engineered, even by a Quantum Computer.

“The NIN holder is the only exclusive issuer of NIN and cannot be delegated,” Pantami said.

He said anonymization was also catered for with the attachment of the User ID of the verifier to every verification request, adding, no NIN, no verification.

They added that the FG must reinforce the need for every Nigerian to have a digital identity, irrespective of social class or economic status, improve access to all and ensure continuous protection of privacy and data of our citizens and other enrollees