The Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) and National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) have indicated interest in deepening their collaboration to ensure seamless future elections.
This is as the chairman of INEC, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, said the commission looks forward to the day when the NIMC database will serve as the single source of accurate citizenship identification, and the national voters register may draw from the citizenship register, as is the case in many jurisdictions around the world.
Yakubu stated this when the Director-General of NIMC, Abisoye Coker-Odusote, paid a courtesy call on him in his office at the INEC national headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday.
He said this development also enables citizens to vote in future elections from their places of choice anywhere in the country, rather than the places they register as voters, as is the case at present.
“To achieve this long-term goal, we will continue to deepen our collaboration with NIMC.”
In furtherance of this collaboration, NIMC is deploying its officials to some of our registration centres during the ongoing nationwide Continuous Voter Registration (CVR).
“The idea is to provide more Nigerians who have yet to enrol in the National Identification Number (NIN) the opportunity to do so. Working with NIMC, we piloted during the recent CVR in Anambra State from 8th to 20th July 2025.
“We are now set to scale it up nationwide. Citizens will therefore be able to register as voters while simultaneously registering for the NIN. In due course, NIMC will provide details of the locations of our CVR centres where it will deploy its officials and also provide the modalities for the NIN registration.
“We welcome this partnership with NIMC, which is in keeping with our commitment to synergise with every national institution to strengthen electoral activities in Nigeria,” Yakubu added.
For her part, Coker-Odusote said NIMC is committed to President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, which aims to ensure that the country continues to have a credible electoral process based on reliable identity systems.
“We are here today to continue this collaboration with INEC further and to see how we can think of ways to achieve this collaboration in line with the mandates we have been given.
“On this note, one of the key steps for us to advance this course is for us to start with INEC on their voter registration exercise for NIMC to ensure that we are available during this process to be able to provide access to Nigerians at the community level to be able to enrol and register,” she added.
