Former NIMC DG honored in France
The immediate past Director General/Chief Executive Officer of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Aliyu Abubakar Aziz, has been presented with an award by the Secure Identity Alliance (SIA) Initiative in Paris, France as a founding member of the body and pioneer chairman of its Advisory Council.
The organisation observed that Aziz, an engineer, played the role exceptionally in ensuring a universal interoperability framework and standards were formulated for the identity industry with the highest level of international acceptance/adoption by ICAO, and getting fair contractual/technology services implementation deals for the NIMC and other technology-dependent agencies in Nigeria in both the Public and Private sectors. The positive outcome of that endeavour was the influencing of the European Economic Interest Groups under the SIA’s decisions on Nigeria and Africa as a whole.
As words engraved in the award stated, “Weather the headwinds, the tailwinds to propel you forward are over the horizon,” the Alliance described Aziz as an asset whose expertise and experience are yet to be fully utilised by the identity industry and therefore an asset in the horizon for the international community to draw from.
The SIA was formed by the public, private sectors and academics in the identity industry (government, researchers, technology and software developers and vendors), with the objectives to reduce or remove the scourge of “vendor lock-in” where an agency is tied to a contract for decades; promote interoperability between components, where it becomes mandatory for the product of one company to be able to talk to the products of a competitor or any other company that may have supplied or is intending to supply solutions to a government agency thereby eliminate the recurring decimal of unnecessary “support and maintenance” agreements (SMAs) described as just a means for these companies to filch as much as they can from Governments in Africa.
