The National Identity Management Commission has launched a program to train and certify more than 4,000 of its staff members across the country as Data Protection Officers, in what the Nigeria Data Protection Commission described as the first time any Nigerian public institution had undertaken the certification of its entire workforce in data protection, establishing a precedent it said other government agencies should follow.
NIMC Director-General Engr. Abisoye Coker-Odusote said the commission held custody of one of the country’s most strategically sensitive assets, the personal information of over 120 million Nigerians and legal residents enrolled in the National Identification Number system, making the protection of that data a national security responsibility rather than a routine administrative function.
She said the training program, implemented in partnership with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, would equip staff with advanced knowledge across data privacy, governance, cybersecurity, breach prevention, and incident response, while building a culture of accountability throughout the organization that went beyond compliance into genuine institutional commitment to protecting citizens’ rights. The program would also be extended to vendors and strategic partners operating within the identity ecosystem to ensure that data protection standards applied across the entire chain of custody for citizens’ information.
NDPC National Commissioner Dr. Vincent Olatunji said the data protection sector had generated more than 27,000 jobs over the past three years and was emerging as a significant source of professional employment in Nigeria’s digital economy, and commended the NIMC leadership for what he described as a visionary and model approach to data governance that demonstrated how public institutions could lead rather than lag on this critical issue.
With the NIN database serving as the backbone of government services, financial inclusion programs, security operations, and digital transactions, experts said the integrity and security of that infrastructure was foundational to the country’s entire digital transformation agenda, making the NIMC’s investment in data protection capacity one of the most consequential institutional decisions in the sector.
