You can’t build a digital economy on a broken foundation

A Lagos-based logistics firm extends a job offer to a qualified candidate. The background check begins. The applicant’s National Identification Number doesn’t match their WAEC certificate name. Their BVN carries a different date of birth. No fraud is suspected: just three government databases, three different records, and one person. The offer is quietly withdrawn. The candidate never finds out why.

This is not an edge case. It is the defining friction of Nigeria’s identity infrastructure, and it has a compounding cost that we rarely account for honestly. Nigeria currently operates at least seven parallel identity systems: the NIN, BVN, voter’s card, driver’s licence, TIN, CAC registration, and international passport. Each was built for a specific purpose. None were built to talk to each other. NIMC has enrolled over 100 million Nigerians, a genuine achievement; yet, duplication, data errors, and incomplete records remain widespread across the ecosystem. The result is a country that knows who its people are in theory but struggles to prove it in practice.

The economic cost is not abstract. In 2016, a federal government payroll audit linked to the Bank Verification Number (BVN) system uncovered over 23,000 ghost workers, stripping billions of naira in monthly wage payments and revealing how fragmented identity records allowed duplicate and unverifiable entries to persist across the public payroll. The same pattern is still visible in the private sector. Financial institutions continue to carry significant non-performing loans, some of which are linked to weaknesses in identity verification at onboarding. In hiring, credential fraud rarely makes headlines, but it quietly drives up the cost of bad decisions and operational risk across organisations.

Identity infrastructure is economic infrastructure. It belongs in the same category as roads, broadband, and power because it quietly determines how efficiently an economy can function. In recent years, several countries have demonstrated how a unified identity layer can improve access to credit, reduce friction in public services, and strengthen financial inclusion when properly integrated across systems.

The broader lesson is simple: identity is not just a government IT function; it is a foundation for a digital economy. Nigeria’s ambition of a $1 trillion economy depends on more than capital and policy direction. It depends on trust at scale, and in commerce, trust begins with reliable verification of who people are.

Across background checks in both public and private sector environments, a consistent pattern emerges: the bottleneck is rarely the individual; it is the record. Employers want to hire with confidence. Financial institutions want to lend responsibly. Regulators want to enforce accountability. But when the underlying data infrastructure is incomplete or inconsistent, decision-making shifts from verification to assumption.

The path forward requires three deliberate steps. First, mandate interoperability between NIMC, CAC, BVN, and FIRS databases. These systems already hold overlapping information on the same individuals and entities, but they need to be designed to reconcile differences rather than produce contradictions. Second, establish a standardised verification API for private sector access. Businesses, lenders, and employers should not be forced to rely on fragmented, siloed checks when a single trusted layer can serve as the reference point.

Third, rethink how NIMC’s performance is measured. Enrolment figures are important, but they are only the starting point. The real measure should be data quality – how accurate, consistent, and up-to-date the records are.

Nigeria is not short of ambition, talent, or opportunity. What it cannot afford is to keep building a digital economy on records that don’t match. Every hire made on bad data, every loan extended on an unverified identity, and every ghost worker that slips through is not a system glitch. They are the price of deferred infrastructure investment. The foundation must be fixed before the building gets any taller.