In January, PREMIUM TIMES reported how NPC officials in Abuja were taking advantage of the rush for birth attestation certificates to impose unreceipted cash payment of N2000 “administrative charges” on applicants.
At 8:10 a.m. on Friday, 9 February, about a dozen youths in their upper teens and early 20s, male and female, were perched on the low fence at 17 Lingu Crescent at Wuse 2 in Abuja.
The place is one of the annexe offices of the National Population Commission (NPC) headquarters in Abuja dedicated to attending to Nigerians in need of birth attestations and birth certificates.
The youths, the first set of applicants to arrive at the office that day, were clutching broad, brown envelopes as they chattered away the interminable time of waiting for the arrival of the agency’s officials.
While they chatted, frustrations also welled up in them.
“We can no longer continue to wait endlessly for the birth attestation that is our right as Nigerians,” Ikenna Kalu, one of the applicants, blurted out the indignation shared by the rest of them at 8:47 a.m.
Some of the applicants said they had arrived an hour earlier to be part of the first set of applicants to be attended to.
As the cool morning breeze gradually receded, giving way to the peeking sunlight smiling down from the sky, the applicants grew in their dozens, and their patience waned drastically.
Finally, at 9:10 a.m., a female official of the NPC emerged at the gate bearing freshly printed-out application forms with numbers circled in red ink.
As she stood to hand out the forms, the crowd of applicants, not less than 50 in number, surged towards her.
By official standards, the applicants only needed to present two compulsory documents – a court affidavit and an online payment slip evidencing payment of N2,000 directly into the government’s coffer – to obtain their birth attestation and birth certificate.
After about 15 minutes of rowdiness and the official had returned to her office, some applicants could be seen lining the low fence of the premises while others huddled around flat surfaces in sight, such as the bonnets of cars parked nearby, to complete their forms.
After completing the forms, they turned their gaze to the NPC premises in anxious expectation of the return of the official to take them to the next stage of the arduous process.
As the expectant applicants looked forward to the next steps, they were joined by more and more persons, who were coming to either begin the process or continue from where they had stopped earlier.
Exploiting the rush for birth attestation
The NPC is Nigeria’s statutory agency with the mandate of issuing confirmation for “vital” life events, mostly birth, death and marriages, to Nigerians.
In a renewed vigour to keep robust, credible digital records of Nigeria’s population, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), the custodian of the nation’s central National Identity Database and regulator of all national identity matters, demands that any request for correction of biodata details on the National Identity Number (NIN) must be accompanied with a birth attestation certificate issued by the NPC.
The development forces many Nigerians to throng the NPC offices across the country to obtain their birth attestation certificates, now in high demand, to complete registration and documentation for academic examinations and other official purposes.
In January, this newspaper reported how NPC officials in Abuja were taking advantage of the rush to impose unreceipted cash payment of N2,000 “administrative charges” on desperate Nigerians in need of birth documents.
The illegal payment rivalled the official fee of N2000 payable directly to the government’s coffers through the bank, which is all that is charged by the government to issue the document.
At the 17, Lingu Crescent, Wuse 2, Abuja office of the NPC in January, applicants were allowed into the office building, where they were handed application forms to complete.
They scrambled for available standing or squatting positions near any flat surface, including the floor and edges of tables, in the crowded office space to fill out their forms.
After completing the forms, the applicants joined a queue, forming a blurry column within the jam-packed office to hand their filled-out forms accompanied with relevant documents and the “N2000 administrative charges” to an official.
The official received the forms from the applicants in turn and carefully stapled the currency notes each applicant submitted to their forms. After going the same round with all the applicants in the queue at a given time, the official disappeared into an inner room, setting off a two to three hours wait, for the set of applicants to receive the printouts of their birth documents.
Cash payment of N2000 is gratification – NPC
Reacting to our report exposing the extortionist scheme in a statement shared via its X handle on 25 January, the NPC stressed that no administrative charge was required for the issuance of an attestation or birth certificate “except the N2000 official fee which is to be paid through bank remita.”
It further clarified that “Registration of birth remains free of charge for ages 1 to 17 years,” and that “The registration of deaths is also free of charge.”
It went further to condemn any “demand for gratification by its staff in the course of discharging their duties.”
“We are resolute in maintaining transparent and accountable operations in carrying out the mandate of the commission of providing demographic data for national development,” the agency said.
While promising to probe the extortion and mete out appropriate sanctions to any staff member found culpable, it urged Nigerians to report any demand for cash from its officials during the birth registration exercise.
Extortion, waste of manhour, chaos persist
Despite the NPC management’s warning and threat of a probe, the registration process at the NPC office is still characterised by extortion.
The extorting officials are, however, not deaf or blind to their management’s statement. In response to it, they have modified their method to ward off scrutiny and reduce complaints as much as possible.
Firstly, they have removed the notice that was brazenly pasted to their office walls requesting the illegal cash payment of N2,000 administrative charges from applicants.
They have also slashed the illegal charges from N2,000 to N1,000.
To cap their strategy, they have also stopped allowing applicants into their premises, a departure from the previous practice of letting applicants into the office building when this reporter visited the office in January.
In the modified strategy of continuing the extortion, the official who had distributed printed forms to the first set of about 50 applicants on 9 February, returned about 30 minutes later to retrieve the completed forms.
To a distant observer, the official arrived to just collect the forms and return to the office building to process them. But the reality is that the official had managed to spread the instruction to applicants to tuck their N1000 “admin charges” in their documents.
An applicant riled up by the scene playing out, suddenly burst out in anger, creating a spectacle of chaos.
Machie Lawrence, a lawyer, who came to the venue from a court session, insisted on entering the office as instructed by the NPC on its banner inviting potential applicants to register for their vital events.
He had a little success, struggling with the security personnel at the gate, to gain entry into the premises.
But overpowered by the security details, Mr Lawrence had his black bag flung away and himself forcibly removed from the building by an operative of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corp (NSCDC) on secondment to the office.
Still catching his breath, Mr Lawrence told this reporter, “What is going on here is extortion, and what is more troubling is the impunity and arrogance with which it is being perpetrated by the NPC officials.”
Another applicant, Rebecca Tolu, decried NPC’s collection of N1,000 as administrative charges aside from the N2000 official fee being paid through the bank per applicant.
“The extortion at the NPC is widespread,” Ms Tolu said, revealing that she paid N12,000 as registration fees for her three children aged nine, six and two.
“On Monday at the NPC office in Abuja where I had gone to register three of my kids ages two, four and nine, the NPC officials who attended to me made sure they collected cash from me. Thereafter, I requested a receipt for the payment, but the officials refused. So, it’s not true to say birth registration is free,” Ms Tolu told PREMIUM TIMES.
Ms Tolu’s experience contradicts NPC’s claim that “registration of birth remains free of charge for ages 0 – 17 years.”
While Mr Lawrence and Ms Tolu were incensed by the extra charges being levied on applicants, Grace Ogah, another applicant, was displeased by the hours wasted at the commission in a bid to obtain her birth attestation certificate.
“The illegal charges being levied on birth registration applicants is the least of the issues. For me, the amount of manhour being wasted here just to obtain an otherwise simple document is disheartening,” Ms Ogah lamented.
Slow take-off of digitisation agenda
By design, the registration exercise, under the new digitisation process launched last year, ought to be seamless and last only a few minutes without the need to visit any NPC offices.
On 8 November 2023, President Bola Tinubu launched the electronic Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System (e-CRVS), a data repository, as part of the broad agenda of the NPC to digitalise civil registration of vital events such as births, marriages and deaths.
The effort fits into a continental and global agenda.
At the Sixth Session of the Conference of African Ministers responsible for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CVRS) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in December 2022, a resolution was passed encouraging all African countries to automate the CVRS process and ensure implementation of the United National Legal Identity Agenda.
Member states were also asked to develop an electronic technology-driven system to boost data generation and civil statistics.
The resolution ushered in the NPC’s e-CVRS.
In collaboration with UNICEF, the NPC developed the e-CRVS to integrate data from multiple systems to securely store data on a large scale, in a cost-effective way in Nigeria.
The e-CVRS launched by Mr Tinubu in November last year encompasses the vital registration aspect, tagged VitalReg. The tag is being used to drive awareness campaigns aimed at securing the buy-in of citizens.
How online registration is meant to work
A 51-second video clip put out by the NPC to advertise the easy online registration process indicates that birth registration or birth attestation ought to take about three minutes.
In the procedure enumerated in the video, applicants begin the process by logging onto the NPC website, where they are required to click on services.
Then, they are redirected to birth attestation “self-service.” It is followed by a service payment of N3000 using a debit card.
The last step of the online registration process entails inputting applicants’ details like the national identity number, facial verification using a camera, date of birth, and local government area of origin.
After going through the steps, the video clip shows an attestation certificate popping up on the screen and the narrator’s voice ending with “Now I have my certificate, all these done in less than three minutes.”
In another short video clip posted on its official X handle recently, the NPC chairman, Nasir Kwarra, said it took him five minutes to obtain his digital birth attestation certificate through the self-service on the commission’s website.
Ideal vs Reality
Ms Ogah, who groaned about the avoidable waste of precious time manual registration process meant for her, shared an experience that contradicts Mr Kwarra’s claim of a seamless online portal.
The portal is being managed by Barnksforte Technologies Limited – a local ICT solution provider praised by the NPC as having a track record of success in ICT solution provision with government agencies.
“I came to the NPC office in Abuja because I couldn’t obtain my birth attestation through the digital platform,” Ms Ogah said, re-echoing assertions by NPC staff members that the e-CRVS system “is being test-run and cannot give digital birth attestation certificate for now.”
“We have received complaints from Nigerians in the USA who spent thousands of dollars to get the automated birth certificate but to no avail,” a registration officer was heard telling applicants at the NPC office in Abuja this month.
He said embassies and other foreign entities declined to recognise the digital birth attestation certificates. But PREMIUM TIMES could not independently verify the claims.
With the slow take-off of the portal, Nigerians are going to wait much longer before they can enjoy the digitisation expenditure of the NPC.
In its 2024 appropriation, the NPC earmarked N20 million as fees for its “website and web portal.” It also budgeted N5.6 million for “information technology consulting.”
Furthermore, the commission appropriated N3.5 million for the “printing of non-security documents.”
Rush for birth registration, goldmine for NPC officials
The sudden surge of birth registration applicants was triggered by NIMC’s announcement last year that applicants seeking to correct details such as date of birth on their National Identification Number (NIN) record must present a birth attestation issued by the NPC.
The NIN remains Nigeria’s foundational means of identification, which other transactions such as the issuance of passports, bank accounts, and driver’s licences are built on.
The development is linked to Nigeria’s drive to automate its governance processes, especially payment systems, citizens’ identity databases, and data exchange.
NIMC, as of 31 December 2023, had captured the biometric details of 104.16 million Nigerians into the national database.
Increasingly, institutions like banks, examination bodies and the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) are using technology-driven systems to render services, and are requesting NIN details to onboard applicants in need of their services.
This has considerably reduced the stress and waiting time for applicants to receive services through the automated systems of the institutions.
But while the NPC’s self-service portal flounders, NPC officials reap the windfall resulting from the need for applicants seeking birth attestation and other related documents to physically visit their offices across the country.
For the six hours of monitoring the exercise at 17 Lingu Crescent in Abuja earlier this month, this report kept a tally of 99 applicants that thronged the commission’s office in Abuja. They all parted with the illegal N1,000 admin charges.
On an hourly basis, between 11 and 13 applicants arrived at the agency for birth attestation registration.
Typically, it takes a minimum of three to four hours for an applicant to obtain their birth attestation, but it can take longer as some applicants told PREMIUM TIMES they had been on it for days.
The process which entails filling out forms and typing of applicant’s details, ends with the signing of the birth document by Madiu Suleiman, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) director of the NPC, Abuja.
“For two days now, I have been trying to process my attestation application. Against all odds, the extortion and ill-treatment by NPC officials, I now have my certificate,” an applicant, Odo Wisdom, told PREMIUM TIMES outside the NPC annexe office in Abuja this month, heaving a sigh of relief.
Ms Tolu, who said she had to pay N12,000 for her three underage children, who are officially not required to pay a dime, accused the officials of deliberately creating “impediments to force desperate applicants to pay as much as N15,000 through the back door for the attestation.”
True to her assertion, NPC officials are fond of fawning over desperate applicants with well-to-do persona, pitching to them to go for what they termed “express application” at a cost ranging between N8,000 and N20,000. This alternative route guarantees obtaining the sought-after birth certificate within 20 to 30 minutes.
For instance, an official simply identified as Chidinma was stuck in her black Lexus car parked opposite the NPC office at 17 Lingu Crescent, Wuse 2, attending to applicants who were willing to procure the birth attestation without hassle at N15,000.
Chidinma shuttled between her car parked under a tree and the NPC office where she processed the documents for her clients who waited in their chauffeur-driven cars, unlike regular applicants who had to wait long hours in batches at the gate to have theirs processed.
As they milk well-heeled applicants, they also do not spare small-time applicants who are unwilling to pay the illegal N1,000 administrative charges.
Although the notice announcing the illegitimate charges was removed from the office wall following PREMIUM TIMES’ initial report in January, any applicant who failed to pay the “administrative charges,” revised downward to N1000, did not get their attestation certificate. The officials simply returned such applications as submitted to the owner.
Extortion countrywide
When the NPC management issued the statement in January in response to the PREMIUM TIMES report, urging Nigerians not to give cash to its officials for birth registration, some X users swiftly relayed their experiences regarding the extortionist scheme.
“I paid 3500 at your office in Jos for attestation of birth,” an X user @L.Babatunde wrote about his encounter in Jos, Plateau State, North-central Nigeria.
Another X user @agbaue_p in Asaba, Delta State, South-south Nigeria, said, “I payed (sic) #5000 this week in (the) Asaba office for attestation of birth.”
Jamila Adamu, an X user who did not disclose his location, said “I am a victim, I go (sic) for attestation, they told me that I am going to pay Remita 2k, then their fee is 2k that’s 4k. They’re collecting money from people.”
The situation is the same in Lagos, where Seun Olota, a birth attestation applicant wrote PREMIUM TIMES, narrating his ordeal at the hands of NPC officials in the Lekki area of the state.
“NPC staff at the LG in Lekki boldly said it’s N18,000 and I said that the NPC’s mandate is to issue citizens this document. NPC didn’t announce this amount, how come? That silence brought me here. How much is marriage registration at the registry? It should be probed,” Mr Olota wrote.
But Mr Olota’s appeal may not spur the authorities to act.
Similar calls had been made by anti-corruption campaigners in our initial article, urging Nigeria’s anti-graft agencies – the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) – to investigate the ongoing fraud at the NPC.
Two top anti-corruption activists in Nigeria – Eze Onyekpere and Debo Adeniran – in their separate interviews with this reporter, asked the ICPC and EFCC to swing into action over the illegal cash transactions at NPC.
They pointed out that the cash payments violate Nigeria’s policy on e-payment for public services.
The culture runs deep and widespread in Nigeria’s public sector.
In 2012, the government launched a digital payment platform called Remita. It drives the country’s Treasury Single Account (TSA), aimed at blocking revenue leakages.
But the policy only became operational in 2015 when Muhammadu Buhari became Nigeria’s president.
Some government agencies whose officials are averse to financial transparency, which the system seeks to foster, have invented all sorts of excuses to bypass it, in the end, depriving the government of the much-needed revenues, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, Jeremiah Umaru from Nasarawa State, remarked last November.
NPC declines comment
The acting director of public affairs at NPC, Nkoyo Nwakusor, said it was not within her mandate to speak on issues bordering on our findings. She responded in a similar fashion when contacted on PREMIUM TIMES’ earlier report.
Ms Nwakusor told this newspaper on Thursday at her office in Abuja that “it is the duty of the Director of VitalReg (Sunday Matthew) to speak on the issues you have raised about birth attestation and birth certificates registration.”
She, however, reiterated NPC’s earlier reaction to PREMIUM TIMES’ report on the issue that no birth registration officer is allowed to demand cash payments in any form from applicants.
“The NPC Chairman Nasir Kwarra frowns at any form of extortion by registration officials, and anyone found wanting will be dealt with,” Ms Nwakusor said.
When this reporter sought to speak with NPC’s director of vital registration, Sunday Matthew, officials at the office said he was not available for comments.
But one of the officials who declined to give his name, challenged this reporter to show any evidence of extortion at the NPC centre.
He said the commission had since January warned its staff members against collecting “administrative charges” from birth-related documents applicants.
