DIGITAL IDENTITY: NIGERIA EDITION

In your pocket there’s something at the center of one of today’s most profound technological and political shifts: an ID. Around the world, over 100 countries are pushing their citizens towards standardized biometric national identification systems to improve the provision of government services and reduce fraud.

We’ve written before about India’s Aadhaar initiative, a digital ID and biometrics program, which has registered over a billion people, or more than 90 percent of India’s population. In Nigeria, the government is moving to make a similar scheme mandatory for all recipients of government services. The National Identification Number, or NIN, which was introduced in 2014, hasn’t had the success as Aadhaar—with only 15 percent of Nigerians signing up to date.

That could now change, and the lesson of Nigeria’s experiment sheds a light on the opportunities and challenges of this important technology:

Better services vs higher costs: As with Aadhaar, Nigeria’s digital ID has the potential to cut fraud and smooth the way for millions of poorer citizens to receive government services more easily. Through the scheme, Nigerians will be granted greater access to banks, insurance, and pensions. But along with better services also comes higher costs. Today, only around one-in-four Nigerians pays taxes. The government hopes that the national identification number will help to bring that up, by expanding their ability to track and tax individuals’ incomes.

Ambition vs implementation: Signing up millions of people by the January deadline will be a logistical nightmare. In Nigeria, many people, particularly in rural areas, live far from the government offices where biometric details are harvested, and it’s not clear that the government has the capacity to pull off a crash registration program. But overcoming this initial hurdle could pay big dividends by, for example, enabling the government to provide aid and services to around 2 million internally displaced Nigerians.

Security vs privacy: The biometric system could also help to stem the cross-border movements of Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group concentrated in northeastern Nigeria. The militants had earlier been caught producing fake IDs—an attempt to skirt army border checks. The flipside: keeping so much sensitive citizen data in one place is an invitation to hackers and criminals to try to steal it. There’s also the risk that, without the proper controls or safeguards, a system that tracks its citizens so closely could open the door to mass surveillance.

More from GZERO Media

Protesters line the street outside Alligator Alcatraz in Ochopee, Florida, holding signs during a vigil on Aug. 10, 2025.

60: A federal judge gave the White House and the Florida state government 60 days to shut down “Alligator Alcatraz,” a controversial immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades that has become a symbol of US President Donald Trump’s severe immigration policies.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a visit to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., USA, on August 13, 2025.

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

US President Donald Trump has made the arts a target and a tool, putting museums, cultural institutions, and federally-funded arts programs on the defensive.

A service member of the 44th Separate Artillery Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces fires a 2S22 Bohdana self-propelled howitzer towards Russian troops near a front line, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine August 20, 2025.
REUTERS/Maksym Kishka
President Donald Trump meets with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron.
LIFEGUARD SHORTAGE!

614: For all the US efforts to end it, the Russia-Ukraine war is showing no signs of slowing down, as Moscow fired 614 drones and other missiles at its neighbor.

Members of the Hargeisa Basketball Girls team wrapped in the Somaliland flags walk on Road Number One during the Independence Day Eve celebrations in Hargeisa, Somaliland, on May 17, 2024.
REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri

Last week, US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) became the latest American conservative to voice support for Somaliland, as he publicly urged the Trump administration to recognize it as a country. Doing so would come with benefits and risks.