From registering people at birth, giving them legal identity, and linking that information to national planning and budgeting, technology can help us stitch everything together, said Kashifu Inuwa, Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency NITDA, during a recent national meeting on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics CRVS reform. His words reflect a growing urgency within Nigerias tech and governance circles: without harmonised digital identity systems, the country cannot plan, govern, or secure itself effectively. As Nigeria pushes forward on digital transformation, the fragmented state of its data infrastructure is no longer just a technical challenge. From ghost pensioners and unverifiable voters to jailbreaks that nearly go undetected, the absence of integrated identity and data systems has created cracks across sectors, eroding public trust and weakening national development.
Despite years of digitisation efforts, Nigerias public data systems remain largely fragmented. Agencies such as NIMC, NPC, NBS, the Federal Inland Revenue Service FIRS, and the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC collect and store data in silos. They rarely share information, and when they do, interoperability is hindered by incompatible systems, bureaucratic resistance, and the absence of enforceable data standards. This lack of cohesion leads to duplicated efforts and contradictory figures that weaken the integrity of governance.
Population data, for example, often varies wildly between agencies, undermining national planning and resulting in misallocated resources. The consequences are far-reaching. Government welfare programmes often fail to reach their intended beneficiaries, with some citizens registering multiple times across platforms while others remain completely excluded from public records.
Security, too, suffers under this fragmented regime. Law enforcement agencies lack access to a single, verifiable database of citizens and residents, making it difficult to track suspects or authenticate identities. A striking example occurred in May 2025, when an inmate was smuggled out of Kirikiri Prison and taken to a Nigerian Immigration Service NIS office to obtain a passport. The passport offices system failed to detect his incarceration, and the application would have been approved if not for a slip of the tongue from the accompanying officer. This alarming breach exposed the failure of cross-agency biometric and criminal data integration, a failure that could have had serious security implications.
