Police biometric CMR racket

HIDING behind the threats of terrorism, armed robbery, kidnapping and other crimes, government officials are competing fiercely to heap bureaucratic and financial burdens on the public in the guise of combating insecurity. The latest assault is coming from the Inspector-General of Police, Muhammed Abubakar, who has decreed a biometric data capture of all Nigerians who own vehicles. He conveniently forgets, or pretends to forget, that he is merely duplicating what the Federal Road Safety Commission and the states are already doing through the issuance of new driving licences and vehicle plate numbers. The questionable scheme should be stopped.


Abubakar’s project requires all automobile owners to present themselves for biometric data capture to obtain the Central Motor Registry documents, a police report certifying ownership of vehicles. According to his spokesman, Frank Mba, the new Biometric CMR is designed “for forensic analysis where finger prints could be matched or verified”, and is a means of attaching a vehicle owner’s personal data to his vehicle “for proper identification and protection.”

Ordinarily, any measure that will enhance security of lives and property is to be welcomed. But this venture is dubious in its entirety. In July 2012, the Senate said as much, when it directed the Police to discontinue the BCMR forthwith. The Police, Senators agreed, were only attempting to duplicate what the FRSC and the states vehicle inspection offices were already doing. Rather than heed the Senate’s counsel that the Police merge their biometric data collection with the existing and ongoing data base collection of the FRSC, Abubakar, typical of officials with a secret agenda, has re-emerged to spring his BCMR on the public. When the government authorised the Police to maintain a central registry of all vehicle licences issued in the country, common sense should have dictated that it would collate the data from the state VIOs rather than build another bureaucracy, which they are unsuited to manage.

The FRSC has since gone ahead to design the new driving licence and vehicle licence plates, which are also extortionist in form and implementation. The former is a biometric data capture regime and the latter is also detailed, personalised and not transferable. The upshot, as the FRSC Corps Marshal, Osita Chidoka, pointed out recently, is that data on owners of licences are available to all security agencies at the click of a button. More: the commission has introduced hand-held devices that will enable police and road marshals to instantly access all data on any driver or vehicle on the field.

Why then is Abubakar bent on replicating these? The motivation is likely to be the money. At N3,500 per vehicle, and N1,500 per motorcycle or tricycle, the lure of raking in billions of naira in revenue is apparently irresistible to the Police top brass and their collaborators. Police claim that no section of the National Road Traffic Regulations of 2004 empowers the FRSC to register vehicles and maintain database of same. They say the responsibility of vehicle registration rests on Motor Licensing Authorities of each state of the Federation. Probably seeking to match the FRSC in its new-found mode of conjuring revenue-yielding schemes, the police IG is playing catch-up. The same police once devised a scam involving recruitment using scratch cards that raked in billions of naira and ended (inevitably) in scandal. The N5,000 fee the same IG imposed on permits for tinted vehicle glasses comes to between N10,000 and N15,000 to obtain, as corruption takes over, while its role in checking crime is debatable. This is mean and hard-hearted.

There should be a limit to how officials play on the terrorism and crime threat to run rings round the rest of us. The clever officials at the Joint Tax Board and FRSC have already used up that card and, unlike the disingenuous police, rode on the back of the states to unload the new licence regime. The police cannot hide under the finger of CMR to become a rival vehicle licensing authority. Compiling a central vehicle registry is not an excuse to set up a money-spinning bureaucracy that will inevitably morph into a den of corruption.

Why does every government action in Nigeria turn awry? Obtaining a driving licence in the United Kingdom costs £50 and is valid for up to 10 years while normal renewal for another 10 years costs just £20. In civilised societies, renewals are phased in as licences expire. Not here. Citizens of countries such as the United States, Canada, the UK and Israel with more serious security challenges are expressing concerns of possible abuses of the power the biometric database puts in the hands of authorities and of leaks that could see the information end up in wrong hands.

The police action epitomises the disorganised state of governance in this country. The FRSC claims it costs the agency N3,000 and N7,500 to produce a driving licence and a vehicle number plate respectively. But the commission’s inefficient production plant for number plates and data capture machines for driving licences are responsible for the high disparity between the cost of production and the cost of acquisition. Instructively, the police have failed woefully to build an efficient national fingerprint data bank, even of arrested felons, which is the standard practice everywhere else; but are now suddenly desperate to obtain data on motorists. It can only be because motorists are able to pay and many petty criminals cannot.

The National Assembly should halt this devious scheme. The lawmakers and President Goodluck Jonathan should not be hoodwinked by this obvious cheap trick of playing the insecurity card. Nigerians should end their infernal docility and vigorously resist oppression. Civil society groups and the Nigerian Bar Association should be defenders of the people and the constitution in the face of oppressive officials. Citizens should be encouraged to test such impositions as Abubakar’s in the courts individually and through class-action suits.

Punch Editorial