The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Pantami said the Federal Government is planning to replace the Bank Verification Number (BVN) with the National Identity Number (NIN). Dr. Pantami made this known while addressing newsmen following a facility tour and inspection of the ongoing NIN enrolment exercise at NIMC and other designated centres in Abuja. He added that he made a presentation to the National Economic Sustainability Committee and drew the attention of Godwin Emefiele, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor on the need to replace the BVN with NIN, citing that while the BVN is a regulator’s policy, the NIN is a law.
The minister noted that the BVN is only required for people with bank accounts, while every Nigerian citizen and the legal resident is required to have a NIN.
“The strength of the law wherever you go is not the same with a policy of one institution,” the minister said.
He stated that “BVN is our secondary database, while NIN and the database is the primary one in the country that each and every institution should make reference to NIMC.”
Pantami stressed the need to enhance Nigeria’s database protection for better security, adding that Nigeria is the leading country in Africa with a level of 99.9 percent secured database.
“That is why we came up with the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation that we always enforce and this is applicable to the database at our disposal.
“We take care of it and make sure that security is excellent and we don’t allow anybody to compromise the content because it is a trust from our citizens given to us.’’