Following the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) website that went down on December 21, 2020, The Director-General of the NIMC Aliyu Aziz, has explained why the commission’s website went down.
Content revealed on the website shows that the website was designed with WordPress. The website hosts the details of the commission and information on the enrollment process for the National Identity Number (NIN) has now been offline since the late hours of Monday. The image below is a preview of what you would see when you access some linked pages of the official website.
The Director-General of the NIMC told Premium Times that they were not prepared to have huge traffic on its website.
He further said;
“We have not planned for this kind of upsurge, this will also task how much the agency has.
“Among all the data agencies, we are the least in terms of budget, the least in terms of salary structure and we use experts to manage our system and the private sector comes to take them after a while and pay them better.
“I can say it got to its elasticity level, so it needs to be expanded. You know when you are the limelight, fraudsters will want to exasperate your efforts.
“Right now, when you go to the gates of the centres you will see fraudsters that will offer help to people. All these are not under our control.”
He added that the commission doesn’t have enough capacity to handle the number of persons trying to enrol within the period.
Aliyu Aziz also said;
The current number of enrolled persons has however increased to 43,901,010 from the previous 43 million. This means that almost a million people have enrolled for their NIN in the last one week.
It is clear that some files have been tampered with from the backend hosting data, however, it is unclear how soon the issue would be resolved. it is also unclear if any previous data would be lost due to this issue.
