Does govt want to use us for money ritual?

About 85.51 million bank customers, news reports said this week, might not to be able to withdraw from their bank accounts by March 1, 2024 following their inability to link their National Identification Numbers (NINs) and/or Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) to their accounts. Said LEADERSHIP newspaper: “Data from the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) shows Nigeria has 146 million active bank customers (individual) as of December 2022. As of January 26, 2024, the BVN count on the NIBSS portal was 60.49 million. On NIN, about 104 million NINs have been issued as of December 2023. And with about 24 hours to the March 1, 2024 deadline given by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for customers to link their BVN) and/or NIN to their bank accounts and wallets, Nigerians have raised issues surrounding verifying their NIN with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).”

If this news proves anything, it is the fact that those in government have absolutely no regard for the people. Nigerians went through hell recently re-registering for the same NINs they had registered for through the GSM companies. Those companies issued NINs to people two years ago, yet asked them to re-register this year. Now, after pauperizing Nigerians through punitive policies, leading to widespread and unprecedented hunger in the land, the government still asked the same people to go line up in banks to do an entirely needless exercise. The same government that has people’s BVN and NIN in its possession is asking people to provide them or risk losing their bank accounts! There is extreme heat in the country at the moment compounded by extreme hunger and inflation. As an OAU undergraduate, I paid N1,500 school fees in my 100 level. Today, that money can only buy a tin of Peak Milk (N1,000) and a small Agege bread (N500). If you need sugar, you have to add more money. A bag of rice costs N100,000 in Lagos, precisely the salary of many senior journalists. In Lagos this week, the police had to provide protesters with biscuits and bottled water, knowing the biting hunger in the land and wanting to avoid casualties. Yet, amidst all this, people who have hardly had anything to eat are being forced to maintain endless and needless queues in banks whose proper tech staff have since exited the country, leaving behind middling interns!

The foregoing notwithstanding, it would still have been possible to persuade the masses to endure the pains if past exercises had yielded discernible results. Obtaining the BVN, when the government came up with the idea, was pure hell. But it did not stop terrorists and kidnappers from making Nigeria a vast human cage and abattoir. The frontline columnist, FarooqKperogi, even detailed an instance in which kidnapping barons received money through bank accounts, yet the authorities acted like captured slaves. We all had number plates when our decisioners asked us to obtain new, high-tech ones that would supposedly enable the government to better police the land. Today, we’re still stuck in la-la land over the issue, yet no one knows what punitive measure the authorities are going to come up with next. This is Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four in all oftheir totalitarian trappings.

Now, picture this scenario as a ‘local’ person. Someone, maybe an admirer, wants to know your name, date of birth, mother’s name, grandmother’s home town, etc. What would you think? You may answer all the questions but when it comes to the one about your mother, you press the pause button precisely because the request sounds extremely strange! Now, consider the demonic directive from banks this week asking you to link your bank accounts with your BVN and NIN, or risk closure of your account by Friday (yesterday)!

I am a GTB, Zenith and Stanbic IBTC customer. Each of those banks read me the riot act during the week, asking me to do NIN-account linkage or risk the wrath of the gods. I followed the link provided by Stanbic, a bank I must now blame myself for using only sparingly, and got the linkage done in less than three minutes. But GTB and Zenith proved to be an utter joke. For days, I tried doing the NIN-account linkage to no avail. Now, I am no tech illiterate and indeed as a journalist, I plan my own pages. GTBfirst provided a link asking people to input their NIN—to no avail, of course. Then it later indicated that the account-NIN linkage would be done through virtual NIN, a directive I obeyed with comedic results: the system indicated endless failures while the bank continued debiting my accounts with the description, Telco charge.

Generating virtual NIN through *346# is of course not free. Even after I had generated Virtual NIN from the NIMC app using GTB’s enterprise code (292968), which I deliberately searched for on the app even though it was on gtbank.com, just to be doubly sure, GTB was still lecturing me about going to the NIMC website to generate Virtual NIN. As for Zenith, using its *966*NIN# provided consistent comic relief: failure, try again later. I will certainly not be visiting ANY bank to do BVN-account linkage.I aint that jobless. Let these clowns go ahead and block my accounts. I will close them immediately. Did I have money there before?

But the banks’ anachronism isn’t even my interest. My interest lies in the government and its endless prying into our privacy. Our BVN contains our fingerprints, name, face, address, date of birth, sex, etc, yet the government is still asking for our NIN. Sounds like what a babalawo would do. Pray, does the government want to use us for money ritual? Think about it: these people obtained our fingerprints through MTN, Glo and the other telecoms providers. Through driver’s licence, voter card, NIMC slip, passport, etc, they know our names, our mother’s maiden names, our grandfather’s name, home address, state of origin, photographs, etc, yet they are asking us to go line up in the banks and do account-NIN linkage! When people start asking your mother’s name, etc, they give the impression that they want to use you to doosole to d’aju (confirmed money ritual). If not, what do these people want to do with our mother’s maiden name, etc? Now, come to think of it, removing subsidy and providing palliatives later is osole to d’aju!

 

Re: A track on Ebilokan: Alaye, pls I wan drop

Greetings and regards.I read your article titled A track on Ebilokan this morning. You articulated the thoughts of thousands there. Good work!

TadeIpadeola

(tadeipadeola@gmail.com).