The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of ProximaForte Ltd, Ayotunde Bally, has proposed the establishment of a National Residents Registration Agency, arguing that Nigeria’s inability to maintain accurate records of where citizens live has become a major obstacle to security, access to credit and effective governance.
Bally made the proposal in a statement made available to The PUNCH, saying Nigeria has made significant progress in building identity systems such as the National Identity Number, Bank Verification Number, passports and driver’s licences, but still lacks a reliable national residency database.
According to him, while existing systems answer the question of who Nigerians are, they do little to establish where they actually live.
“Identity tells the government who a citizen is. Residency tells the government where that citizen can actually be found. Those are two fundamentally different datasets, and conflating them is where the current system falls short,” he said.
He argued that the proposed National Residents Registration Agency would complement, rather than compete with, the NIMC by maintaining an up-to-date database linking residents’ addresses to their National Identity Numbers.
Bally said the absence of reliable residency records weakens law enforcement, limits financial inclusion and hampers planning across sectors.
He explained that under the proposed framework, residents would update their addresses whenever they relocate, creating what he described as a structured and auditable national residency register.
“When law enforcement receives a tip, they shouldn’t have to spend days finding out where a suspect lives. The system should already know,” he said.
Bally said such a system would enable security agencies to respond faster to criminal investigations while helping authorities monitor population movement without amounting to mass surveillance.
“This does not mean constant surveillance. It means creating accountability—a structured, auditable record where an unstructured vacuum currently exists,” he said.
He also linked the proposal to Nigeria’s growing interest in artificial intelligence, arguing that predictive technologies depend on accurate and continuously updated datasets.