CHAPTER ONE

Nigeria as a nation has not gotten a concise database of its citizens. Several means have been tried but to no avail. A database is a collection of information that is organized so that it can be easily accessed, managed and updated (Allan and Adam, 2005). Data is organized into rows, columns and tables, and it is indexed to make it easier to find relevant information. Data gets updated, expanded and deleted as new information is added (ibid). Data bases process workloads to create and update themselves, querying the data they contain and running applications against it.

A software that allows you to define, manipulate, retrieve and manage data stored within a database is known as a database management system (DBMS) (ibid)

Nigeria till date does not have a unified data base.The banks, Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Lagos State Residents Registration Agency (LASRA), the new National Driver’s License and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) have all at one point or the other collected data from Nigerian citizens. Since the NIMC has been saddled with the responsibility of establishing and maintaining a national identity database, then other agencies do not need to collect data from citizens directly again but plug into the NIMC database. Due to the numerous databases maintained by various government agencies in the nation, it simply means these agencies do not trust themselves (Awosanya, 2015)

Another issue with these databases gotten by these agencies is the issue of Verification. No verification exercise is put in place for any of the databases.

Another means of generating a concise database would have been the Census. But the last time census was carried out in Nigeria was in 2006. It took about 2 weeks to collate information for about 160 million citizens. The census exercise then came alongside verification because the agents went from house to house for the physical exercise. Both young, old and even infants were counted; in which other agencies might not be able to gather information for children between the ages of 0-17years because not all of them would have been using a phone or have an account number with the bank.

The nation should make the issue of database a priority so that it can be efficiently achieved.

Nigeria as a nation has been battling with the issue of concise database. Different government agencies have various data bases, which is not even concise. Nigeria really need to generate a permanent, detailed and concise database for its citizens

1. Is the databases of various government agencies concise enough?
2. Is the database base created by the National Identity Management Commission reliable?
3. Can Census generate a reliable database for the nation?