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The Nigerian Senate has been seized on a matter relating to unpaid arrears of Front-End Partners (FEPs) working with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) on digital ID enrollment, and the NIMC Director General, Bisoye Coker-Odusote, is expected to answer questions in this regard in front of a senate committee in the days ahead.

According to Vanguard, the Senate recently received many petitions from some of the FEPs, one of which was filed by the CEO of one partner organisation, Files Solutions, Senator Ayodele Arise.

FEPs have been raising concerns over the non-payment of their money for work they have delivered in the last two years.

In August last year, some of the private partners, who refused to be named, penned an open letter to President Tinubu, expressing their frustration and pleading for his intervention to find a solution to the matter.

Indeed, the ID authority has acknowledged that there are pending financial issues with its enrollment partners. Early this year, the NIMC boss had promised to clear two years of the arrears in the first quarter of 2024. It is not expressly clear if that tranche of payment was actually made.

In one of the petitions submitted to the Senate Committee on National Identity and National Population, the contractors are claiming unpaid debts of about 2.4 billion Naira (approximately US$1.4 million) for conducting enrollment for the National Identification Number (NIN).

They say the agreement was for the NIMC to pay them one Naira (US$0.00059) per enrollment, but some of them say the cost per enrollment eventually went up as they incurred other unforeseen expenses. The arrears are owned from 2022.

The Committee Chairman, Senator Abdul Ningi, is quoted as confirming that they have received a petition involving the NIMC DG and that she will be summoned to the floor of the upper chamber of parliament when business resumes this week. Coker-Odusote was invited by the same Senate Committee in March to discuss challenging confronting the NIMC and efforts to improve digital ID coverage in the country.

File Solutions CEO told Vanguard they provided many services to NIMC including ID’ing internally displaced persons in camps and enrollment in at least a thousand ID centers.

The petitioners have prayed the senate to cause the NIMC to get the money paid to them as soon as possible. They have also called for the disbursement of more funds as part of the efforts to modernize Nigeria’s identity infrastructure.