Nigeria’s Digital Public Infrastructure will track and trace its people with digital ID from birth to death: perspective
The Nigerian government publishes a framework to develop national Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that uses digital ID to track and trace “key life events” of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.
Last week, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, published a document called, “Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework,” outlining the country’s agenda to install DPI.
Digital Public Infrastructure is a civic technology stack that consists of three main components: digital identity, fast payments systems, and data exchanges.
“Throughout a citizen’s life, from birth to old age, there are marked moments of significant life events requiring support or service from the government,” the paper begins.
“Some of these services include registration of births, antenatal healthcare, vaccines, school enrollment, scholarships, health insurance for business registrations, filing of taxes, etc.“
These “life events” require every citizen to have a digital ID.
“The Federal Government of Nigeria is on a mission to appropriately deploy digital technology to support Nigerians through these significant and profound moments so they can integrate into the state and enjoy the benefits of citizenhood from cradle to old age”
Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework, March 2025
“The Nigerian DPI will support significant landmarks such as registration of births, primary healthcare, vaccinations, student scholarships, marriages, mortgages, pensions, retirement and so on”
Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework, March 2025
According to the report, “Identity systems are the backbone of modern digital service delivery, offering a secure and unified means of identifying citizens. It enables seamless access to various services, ensuring that identity verification is accurate, reliable, and easily accessible.”
Most of the DPI pieces are already in place in Nigeria.
For example, Nigeria already has a National Identity number system, along with the payment infrastructure of the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System (NIBBS).
In October 2021, the country launched a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) known as the eNaira, which was so unpopular that one year later less than 0.5 percent of the population was using it.
There is no mention of the eNaira in the latest DPI framework.
Instead, it refers to the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System as being the fast payments structure already in place.
However, in August 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria announced that NIBSS had been integrated onto the eNaira platform.
Then in December 2022, Nigeria’s central bank instructed the country’s banks and other financial institutions to limit the amount of cash that individuals and organizations could withdraw both daily and weekly, while “encouraging” digital channels, such as the eNaira, which also has caps on daily transaction limits.
“Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) Instant Payment (NIP) is now available on the eNaira platform. You can now transfer funds from your eNaira wallet to any Bank account of your choice in Nigeria using the NIBSS Instant Payment (NIP) feature on the eNaira platform”
Central Bank of Nigeria, August 2022
“CBDC could be perceived as an instrument for state surveillance. Some may worry that the government or the central bank could use it to control or restrict payments users can make with CBDC, thereby undermining public trust in central bank money. This can be a particular concern in countries with severe governance and corruption vulnerabilities”
IMF, “Central Bank Digital Currency: Progress And Further Considerations,” November 2024
With interoperability in mind, Nigeria’s DPI report adds that “By providing a standardized and interoperable payment infrastructure, citizens can efficiently conduct financial transactions, supporting economic growth and financial inclusion.”
In the end, the Nigerian government says that its DPI “will be a managed decentralized system, allowing multiple players to share centralized services such as identity management, payment infrastructure and data exchange platforms to foster enhanced security, privacy and governance.”
Within this scheme, “the private sector will have access to permissioned data to build and test products for the public” while “several digital public goods and services are anticipated to emerge from the DPI environment and become global Digital Public Goods (DPGs).”
“Nigeria’s DPI will follow the ‘Collect Once, Use Many Times (COUMT)’ data approach to ensure that only custodian MDAs can collect and keep data, granting access as required or stipulated by the Nigerian DPI framework”
Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework, March 2025
“Governments, including in the context of the Group of 20, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, such as the Digital Public Goods Alliance, are exploring options for developing digital public infrastructure. These public goods harness huge amounts of data that, if safely governed and effectively used, can help countries to accelerate their development and advance the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 5: A Global Digital Compact — An Open, Free and Secure Digital Future For All,” May 2023
On the surface, DPI is being touted as a way for governments to deliver more efficient services to their citizens while saving time and money in the process.
Beneath the surface; however, sits a system ripe for overreach by both public and private entities that combines intense data collection on every citizen while laying the foundation for a potential system of social credit.
“The implementation of DPI is built on three core technology rails: a central identity system, a payment exchange system, and a national data exchange”
Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework, March 2025
A digital identity encompasses everything that makes you unique in the digital realm, and it is a system that can consolidate all of your most personal intimate data, including which websites you visit, your online purchases, health records, financial accounts, and who you’re friends with on social media.
It can be used to determine what products, services, and information are available to you, and it can certainly be used by public and private entities to deny you that access.
Ultimately, a CBDC linked with digital ID could allow governments and corporations to put permissions on what you can buy with your own money, including expiration dates on when you can spend it, and geofencing on where you are allowed to transact with it.
“Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used, and so on. In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people“
WEF Founder Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2017
There is a global push from organizations like the United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to get countries to adopt DPI.
What’s more, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the G20 all want digital ID as a tool to track and trace not just individuals, but objects as well.
For example, on April 12, 2022, the WTO and WEF published a report “encouraging the development of a global certification framework” for digital identity systems of persons and objects — both physical and digital.
The report planted the seed to normalize the idea of treating people like products to be tracked, traced, and monitored for compliance with certain standards.
Just as the WEF and WTO proposed digital ID to track and trace the “life cycle” of products, Nigeria is now taking that same notion to track and trace the “life events” of people.
The government says the purpose of DPI is to deliver better, cheaper, and more efficient quality services to the people.
But how much do the people trust their government that they’d be willing to trade much of their privacy, anonymity, data, and control for a slice of promised conveniency?
Image Source: Clipped from Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy report: “Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework”
