On August 28, President Goodluck Jonathan launched a national identification card scheme for Nigerians. The biometric card will do more than serve as a means of identification – it will also serve as a passport and a depository of all financial records which will be held in trust by an American credit card company,  Mastercard.

This is not the first time a national identification project will be launched. Ten years ago, about $214 million went down the drain in such project. While the expatriates involved in the scam were convicted of bribery in their home country, Nigerians indicted in the scam that did not pass on to glory, roam free. The lesson of the past is how unserious we are about tackling graft. Ten years later, this disdain for due process is now disguised as a banking solution. We should not be deceived.

For one, the claims of a historic launch may be true. There is a chance that if the pilot program to enroll 13 million succeeds, Nigeria is on its way to show the world the danger of trusting in the government to respect citizens’ rights to privacy, especially with its collusion with a private company. The sinister marriage of Big Data and the Nigerian government should raise the hairs on our necks.

At the launch, President Goodluck Jonathan demonstrated the utility of the card by withdrawing money with it. His demonstration of the card’s qualities was impressive. It betrayed the range of information the card will store, from your mother’s maiden name to whether you are Hausa, Kalabari or Ijaw. Although the teaching of history is often relegated in our schools, we should not be ignorant of the dangers of profiling that the scheme portends. The Rwandan genocide was helped by group identification; people were easily dispatched on the basis of their ethnic affiliations.

The claims of a financial inclusion scheme are laudable. The government promises to extend banking services to the unbanked and a means of extending social security benefits in one fell swoop. My previous experience with a bank card that serves as a means of identification makes me circumspect. As a student, it was popular to offer student association cards on bank cards – delivering clientele to the banks and saving cost on production. The combination could only work optimally for one and not the other. If it was a form of identification, one rarely used it as a bank card; if it was useful as one other bank card, another form of identification was needed. The not unusual seizing of cards by ATMs, and the policy of destroying trapped cards betray an apparent inconsistency.

Data breaches and identity fraud are very popular in the digital age. Nigerians are unpopular by them. Running the risk of having a national identity card with such potential brings the joke home.

The eID card is at best, a frightening effort to synchronize citizens’ personal and financial data in a single database with a signing off on privacy rights. At worst, it is an Orwellian scheme with latent dangers. A perusal of the requirements for registration reveals this. A primary proof of identification; of birth and address, and a biometric and financial profile of every citizen available to the government and Mastercard is a gross violation of the rights to privacy which is guaranteed in section 37 of the 1999 constitution. The protection of financial correspondences and telegraphic communications is a corner stone of civil societies. The eID card is a default violation of these rights.