The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr ISA PANTAMI has said the federal government plans to replace Bank Verification Numbers with the National Identity Numbers.
Speaking on Monday in Abuja, the minister said the BVN is a regulator’s policy, not established by law while the NIN is a law.
The minister noted that BVN is only applicable to those who have a bank accounts while NIN is for every citizen and legal resident in the country.
He added that: “BVN is a policy of a bank and has not been established by law, NIN is the only mandatory number and the primary identification of our citizens and every other identification is secondary.
“The NIMC Act 2007 provides that all our citizens must be enrolled and the law gives them 60 days to enroll from the time the law was enacted and a maximum of 180 days. And all permanent residents in the country and legal residents that have to stay here for a minimum of 24 months must be enrolled.
“So this is the primary identification of all and all other data bases are supposed to utilize this and not for NIN to utilize the BVN because it is the primary one.
“We discussed with the CBN Governor today on how to ensure that all our citizens with BVN will immediately be provided with the NIN. We are working on that but facilitating the process lies on CBN to make it much easier for our people.
“I made a presentation to National Economic Sustainability Committee and I drew the attention of CBN governor that we need to replace BVN with NIN because the BVN is a bank policy while NIN is a law.”
The BVN was launched in 2014 by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in order to secure bank transactions and curb criminality in the wider society. It links all bank accounts of an individual to a single set of numbers.
The federal government recently extended the deadline for all Nigerians to link their NINs to their phone numbers to April.
