Nigeria is a metaphor for complications, complexities and confusions. Where these don’t exist in any social aspect of life in Nigeria, the government itself deliberately creates the complications, complexities and confusion; for what reason, no one as yet knows. Perhaps it’s the failure of the intellectual class, with ‘professionals’ as collaborators, well engaged in blame pushing as a ready stock in trade that sustains this.
Have you done your bank verification enrolment? That was the question that Nigerians were burdened with for months right up to June 30 this 2015. The nation’s banking sector regulator and banker of the last resort (we are still waiting to see this in action though), always very eager to overburden the citizenry with one hurdle or the other, had, in its usual catch-up style, perhaps this time to lock out many poor Nigerians from the banking system, introduced yet again another exercise that would see bank customers troop to and line up day in day out in banking halls, just to confirm they are customers, and second to have their data captured all over again!
When the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced the ‘project’ in February 2014, it claimed it’s part of the commercial banks’ Know Your Customer initiative. It claimed the banks’ customers needed BVN, which it now gives as the ultimate solution to all banking problems in Nigeria. It says the customers would be given a ‘unique’ number – as if each bank account number is not a unique number. And, if it is not, then that is the failure of the CBN from the start.
Here’s the same regulator that just a few years ago had brought the burden of NUBAN. In August 2010, the CBN released guidelines on Nigeria Uniform Bank Account Number (NUBAN) scheme, which it claimed was meant to achieve uniform customer bank account numbering structure among all Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria, in line with requirements of the West Africa Monetary Institute, towards the economic integration of ECOWAS countries.
With the NUBAN introduction, bank customers went through the rigours and processes of getting new account numbers all over, something that could easily have been implemented by the banks without burdening the clients. But no; the Nigerian bank customer must pay a high price for any changes or new ‘initiatives’ the CBN thinks up.
And, with the BVN, customers must physically visit their bank branches and their biometrics, their fingerprints, photos, taken, in the CBN’s KYC directive to banks. Yet, these same Nigerians have had to go through the same processes in registering with, at least one or all of, the following: the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the National Identity Card Management Commission (NIMC) for national identity card, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for SIM card registration, the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) for driver’s licence issuance – something that never ever takes off the ground; added to that of course, the Nigeria Immigration Service for the issuance of international passports.
One may then ask: with information and communication technology at its best in Nigeria, what is government doing that at each turn, the same sets of people have to gather at one point or the other, wasting valuable and useful time, wasting scarce resources and energies, all in the name of one biometric registration exercise or the other?
But more worrisome is the Nigerian agencies’ penchant to push their failure upon the citizens. Why didn’t the CBN introduce the so called BVN long before when it did, or at the time it introduced the NUBAN, which required customers being issued new account numbers, so that while the new numbers were being issued, if they must, they could be issued the BVN at once?
Now, here is as another terribly sad trend to it: just the other day, I needed to send a small amount of money to a cousin; after several attempts to make online transfer to no avail due to system failure – usually at one bank or the other – I had to get physical cash and ask a colleague to help make a deposit at a branch of the bank in which my cousin has his account. Millions of Nigerians of course often enough experience this challenge, daily.
After filling the teller with all required information, as printed on the teller, the bank official asked my colleague to also write my cousin’s BVN! It sounded like something out of the blues! Not only did I not have his BVN, someone in the rural area, when did it become a given that to make deposit to someone, you must provide their account number and their BVN?
It took my insistence that my colleague gets the name of the bank official, and their decision to consult the ‘branch operations supervisor’ or whoever, before the money could be paid. This was just days before the June 30 deadline, which has now been shifted to October 31, 2015.
One then begins to ask: are the CBN’s endless registration processes and requirements for bank customers, which it continues to introduce each year, meant to be punitive and to dissuade Nigerians from embracing the banking system? How much time and effort, if any at all, did the CBN put in to educate, enlighten and prepare Nigerians for what suddenly became something they must be given a deadline? Beyond many urban centres, how many bank customers in the rural areas, the very ones the likes of the CBN always hasten to refer to as the ‘unbanked’ (whom the regulator ought to encourage to get into the banking system) know anything about the BVN?
It is quite clear that Nigeria is all motion and no movement in the application of ICTs for national development. ICTs facilitate, simplify and organise activities and processes in private and public life to the extent that repetition is removed, burdensomeness is lessen or eliminated, duplication is nearly impossible; among so many advantages.
If the CBN and the country were serious about ‘capturing’ data of Nigerians, as they continually introduce one disturbing ‘project’ or the other (except to amuse us that they are working), why would all the data, so much of which is already in the hands of one government agency or the other, not be harmonised to the point that each person’s data can be sourced and accessed centrally?
We watch this being done in all other parts of the world; in many of those parts of the world, many Nigerians are directly involved in the processes, as workers or as experts providing skills for a fee or for business. Why can’t this be replicated here, rather than each agency a stand-alone in this day and age? This is both to the detriment of the citizenry and retards growth and prosperity.
Fortunately for the Nigerian government and its many stand-alone agencies, Nigerians are just too easy to rule. I wonder why Nigerians don’t troop out to protest all these inconveniences on top of so many problems they must contend with. Elsewhere, there would be protests in the streets: why would you burden an already overburdened beast-of-burden?
So the CBN is looking forward to October 31, 2015 when every bank customer in Nigeria would have enrolled and have a BVN. It claims this is the now surest path to the end of bank frauds, whereby no one would tamper with customers’ accounts; although this is an old song which has borne no result to that effect. After all, other than the bank customer, who else has access to a customer’s account but the bank staff?
The CBN claims the objectives of the BVN also include to use biometric information as a means of first identifying and verifying all individuals that have account(s) in any Nigerian bank and consequently, as a means of authenticating customer’s identity at point of transactions. Every Nigerian with an account in any bank would tell you their tales of woe of being asked each and every time, for their identification whenever they visit their bank or any bank other than the specific branch where they opened the account. So, what difference would the BVN now make? That we will no longer be asked to identify ourselves when we present a cheque for cashing?
The CBN also claims another objective is to “authenticate transactions without the use of cards using only biometric features and PIN.” And you ask: what’s the sense in all this repetition, going round in circles?
Let’s now wait and see how banking transactions will become “faster” as the CBN claims with BVN, as if customers will no longer present their cheques to cashiers and be asked to produce the regular means of identification before they are paid; or, perhaps the BVN now trains Nigerian bank staff a different way of attending to customers.
Very worrisome however is the danger of all these ‘procedures, projects and initiatives’, which never stop coming the way of the CBN (which by now ought to have got the template from what happens in the developed economies, where we have taken the ICT templates and replicate same here) becoming the very instruments that keep many Nigerians from embracing the banking system.
“That is why I prefer to keep my money in cash, so that I can see it and when I need it I just take it without any hassle,” cried one auto mechanic who said he waited at his bank “for hours without attention for this BVN” and in the process lost business as his customers couldn’t wait that long. They simply took the business elsewhere!
By MKPE ABANG