Former Postmaster-General and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigeria Postal Service, Bisi Adegbuyi, speaks to DANIEL AYANTOYE on the delayed conduct of the national population census, proposed multipurpose card identity by the National Identity Management Commission, digital addressing, and other issues
You recently said it was the responsibility of local governments to have the data of residents in their areas. What do you mean by that?
It is part of the autonomy granted to the local governments by the Supreme Court. The autonomy is not limited to financial freedom; it includes political and administrative autonomy. If you have a government that is recognised by the constitution, it must have a means of planning for its residents, their welfare, and security to ensure good governance at the grassroots. In doing that, each local government must be able to have the number and identity of residents in its area of jurisdiction for administrative purposes. That would assist the government in planning and judicious use of resources in all areas. With the advent of technology, particularly in areas of geolocation, addressing, and identification technologies, these local governments can now do more than they ever thought of because technology is an enabler. Imagine a local government with a comparative advantage in agriculture adopting the latest means of farming, which is called precision and smart farming. That local government would ensure full security for its citizens and adjoining local government. The same thing applies to health in terms of primary healthcare, education, and even community policing, which would serve as a foundation for ensuring that there is security in its area of jurisdiction.
Therefore, the local governments should look beyond financial autonomy, they should look at their constitutional responsibilities which states have taken over, all in the name of trying to assist them to carry out their functions. We need to reorganise governance at the local level, for us to stop blaming the President for everything. For me, the local government autonomy is a game changer. We must now empower the local government to leverage on existing and evolving technologies, which would assist them in many ways, and then we can begin to cater for our people in the rural areas.
Does this mean that the responsibility of the National Identity Management Commission will be absorbed by the local governments?
No, not at all. It will be collaborative. For instance, we are going about our identity management in the wrong way, because we are doing it from top to bottom. Ideally, it should be from the bottom to the top. The local government is crucial to population exercise, identification, and various other things. NIMC will continue to carry out the management of identity, but the local governments are supposed to be the feeders for the NIMC project. Therefore, when local governments embark on the identification of residents, whatever number they come up with should be harmonised by NIMC. So, from one local government to the other, all over, you can have a watertight, effective, reliable, and bottom-up approach to identity management.
Address has always been a means of verifying identity. Identity is not on the exclusive list, so it is not exclusive to federal or state governments. If it is not on the exclusive and concurrent lists, then it means it is residual. This means local governments and individuals can go into an identification project. In a nutshell, local government is the closest to the people, and every part of Nigeria belongs to one local government or the other. Let the government that is closest to the people decide the responsibility of carrying out some of these basic yet fundamental exercises to have a productive outcome. You can’t do a population census now without involving the local governments. I also believe that if local governments are being used as registration centres for identity, you can imagine the kind of ease it will bring for people. Nigerians will not travel from one place to the other to get their identity registered if local governments are involved. No one is taking over the responsibility of the other. It is about collaboration and harmonisation of exercises.
You also said address-based identification would reduce corrupt practices and engender accountability in the local government. But there are concerns about the manipulation of figures of census and identification by local governments. Do you think that concern is justified?
No, I do not agree with that. Yes, corruption is everywhere but we must devise means of reducing it to the barest minimum. One of the game changers, in my view, is this local government autonomy, which must leverage on technology. How best can you fight corruption when residents of the local government are known? You know the number of people you are governing, and these people are also interested in governance; how you spend their money. There must be local government reforms. Autonomy is not an item in the pockets of any man. And what that means is that the leadership recruitment process at the local government level will have to be tinkered with. Some of us who have advocated federalism for years will not mind if INEC is mandated to organise local government elections to mitigate or completely stop this one party winning 100 percent in local government polls. It will be a disservice to the local government autonomy if at the end of the day, governors are allowed to conduct elections and they just return their cronies to take over the local governments. That is not the autonomy we are talking about.
The autonomy we are talking about must be comprehensive; financial, political, and administrative. It would be a whole gamut of reforms. But I reckon that we will have to be taking it one step after the other. Nigerians will have to mobilise themselves to ensure that they take active part in governance at the local government. In any case, we know that this autonomy would have some effects at the end of the day in terms of making some people scapegoats, because public funds in Nigeria are generally seen as belonging to nobody and therefore people can do whatever they like with it. But once you introduce technology into governance at the local government, you are not only going to cut or reduce wastages, you are also going to ensure transparency and accountability.
How can Nigeria leverage on digital addressing, identification and geolocation technologies for the socio-economic development of the 774 LGs?
Since governance is about the people’s wellbeing, addressing, identifying and geolocating the people are the new frontiers in social governance. Addressing people’s needs and challenges should start with how to deploy geolocation technologies to achieve this in line with Chapter of the 1999 Constitution.
On February 2022, an Information Technology expert, Olaniyi Ayoola, raised the alarm that some elements had been frustrating Nigeria’s Digital Addressing Platform which is capable of bringing transparency into almost everything done as a country. Do you think this is still happening?
It is the truth. Technology is an enabler. Once you adopt it, it reduces human-to-human contact and corruption. Clearly, those that are benefitting from this bricks and mortar system will push back because they know the ‘party’ will be coming to an end. Aside from the people who are sabotaging the efforts of the government, the government itself usually approaches issues from the centrist point of view, that is, from the centre. A lot of these initiatives are supposed to be driven from the local government and the states.
What the government at the centre should be doing is to come up with standards. The national addressing standards can’t be found in any law; it is simply because we want to have a standard addressing system all over Nigeria, which is desirable anyway. I can bet with you, addressing will be better driven from the local government with the Federal Government represented by NIMC still exercising its authority in terms of collaboration. It is not a headmaster-student relationship. We don’t want the local government to have an addressing system that will be different from the one that will be in place in Osun State. We desire that standard, but the truth is, whether we like it or not, those people who are still looking at addressing from the point of view of having everything standardised may have to wake up, because technology will disrupts it. I am sure you know the Google Plus code technology is an addressing system. It is in Nigeria. Some people are making use of it. Population is rising. Urban settlements are developing in a rapid manner and the Federal Government cannot cope with it. It means the local government that is nearest to where you are having those urban settlements should take up the responsibility.
Last year, the NIMC revealed plans to begin a general multipurpose card that would be three in one. Do you support this project?
Any card that is commercialised is not what any government agency should do now. But if it is in partnership with the private sector, for as long as the resources of the government would not be used, it is okay. However, I believe rather than adding more identity cards into what we already have in place, we should be looking at how we can converge all these identities into one. If we are talking about multi-purpose cards that can render social services, the word social means that it should not be commercialised. The intention behind social should be to help the people. This is an express personal view. I may be wrong. If I were to be in a position of authority, it would be my priority. My priority would be how to leverage technology to deepen what we have done in terms of NIMC to clean up the system, engender confidence, and then get the buy-in of people. I have read the position of experts and quite a number of people on this. And the propaganda says that, why now? Why do you want to bother people to come and pay? But as you know, because I am pushing an addressed-based identification system, I don’t want to be seen as if I am just exercising what they are doing. But for me, we may be working very hard in the wrong direction with due respect to them.
A huge sum of money was allocated for population census under the last administration but it has not been held. Do you think addressing system can help to ensure less costly process of conducting census?
Let’s not make any mistake, census is desirable. Any census of population that is tied to the revenue allocation system would have political implications. And that is why census has been such a contentious issue in Nigeria, because population is one of the criteria that we use in the distribution of the resources of Nigeria. Already, some parts of Nigeria believe other parts have been unduly advantaged and because population is one of the criteria, they have cooked up figures. So, trust has been severely eroded. When President Bola Tinubu was just elected, I was invited for analysis on a TV station, among the things I said was to advise that he should not go near population census at that time because it has the tendency to further divide us. Look at what is happening to the tax reforms. Something that should ordinarily be applauded, is turned to north issues. Census is important but you must look at the timing of your exercise. Would people that are currently hungry be disposed to being part of a census exercise? They will simply tell you, is this what we are going to eat? So, you can just be conducting a census that the people may not be interested in. I am calling on the National Population Commission to continue its underground work because at some point, we will have to conduct the census. They should work in collaboration with the autonomous local government and ensure they infuse technology into their exercise. I know they have used some technologies but I want to challenge them to go the way of geolocation and addressing technology and conduct an address-based census from Nigeria. It will be less contentious.
