NIN wahala

A veteran journalist and former editor of Businessday Newspaper, Mr. Okwudili Ojukwu-Enendu, is sad about the ugly experience he has passed through since he lost his mobile telephone about seven months ago.

According to Enendu, he lost huge amounts of money and valuable time even as his ordeal persists.

He said: “When I lost my phone on Saturday, September 25, last year, my only worry was about having to buy another phone. I never did Internet banking with the lost phone, which I’d bought in July 2020 and I felt safe. I was so wrong. But that’s a story for another day.

“Recovering your lost telephone line is a most problematic task. Unless you’ve been through this, you can’t imagine the stress it entails.

“I spent an entire day at the office of a telecommunication company in Owerri trying to get my line blocked and then retrieved from the criminals. I was finally told that my National Identity Number (NIN) was unresponsive as it had been generated by my bank. I was told to go to the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) office to ‘revalidate’ the details.

“I have been going through the motions of this ‘revalidation’ with the NIMC for almost six months.  The details are boring, bordering on stupidity, for why would the number be valid, but I have to go every step to ‘revalidate’ it? I finally got ‘captured’ as the NIMC biometrics is called, on October 7, 2021. Then, I was told to come in two weeks for the ID card.

“I got the temporary identity card about two weeks later as they promised, and I was hopeful that I had reached resolution point for my telephone line. How wrong I was!

“Halfway through March, I’m yet to recover my telephone line due to the incompetence and corruption of the NIMC.

“After repeated visits to the NIMC office, I was casually told that they had done their own bit and the rest was up to their head office in Abuja. For the umpteenth time, I checked at the NIMC just before last Christmas and the story was the same, of course. When I moaned that the process started since October 7, 2021, when they did my biometrics, the lady who checked the computer for me told me that sometimes it takes really long, but that with N3,000, she could speed up the process for me.

“That was it then. I should have been ‘smarter.’ Right at the NIMC gates, a young man had made me an unsolicited offer of ‘helping’ me get the document on my very first visit. I ignored him, hoping that doing right was proper. On each visit, somebody would make that offer. And while you are on the queue with others who think like you, workers or touts keep bringing people to jump the queue and the operators gladly oblige. You raise your voice in protest and the women operating the computers totally ignore you. By your third protest, everybody starts looking at you as if you are mad. If N3,000 were beyond my means to pay, I could have crowd-funded from colleagues or kindred. But what kind of a nation is this, where nothing would work without a bribe?

“I wonder if these women holding people like me hostage understand that Owerri has over a hundred thousand young women with bachelor’s degrees and computer skills that would gladly take over their jobs and count themselves lucky to have their salaries without the bribe. But who would sack these barracudas at the NIMC who are wired to Abuja and appear to be an integral part of the organisation’s tapestry?

“I have waited almost six months since I applied for the ‘revalidation’ of my NIN to get back my telephone line. Friends, associates and others have been unable to reach me for almost six months. There is a huge cost to this. In my line of duty, every business and income takes off with a telephone call. I’ve not had the phone for this long. And children of privilege are busy sucking the breasts of Nigeria unmindful of what they are putting others through by their ranking corruption and crass incompetence. Let the supervising minister, Isa Pantami, tell Nigerians that he is unaware of these goings-on.”

Enendu appealed to the authorities to make recovery of lost telephone lines and revalidation of particulars for NIN less cumbersome.