Former postal service chief calls on federal government to connect National Identity Numbers with confirmed home addresses

Former Postmaster-General of the Federation, Bisi Adegbuyi, has urged the Federal Government to utilize the recent partnership between the National Identity Management Commission and the Nigerian Postal Service to establish a national address system, linking every National Identification Number to a verified physical location.

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This system would address the limitation of the current digital identity system, which, despite heavy investment, remains restricted due to the inability of government agencies to reliably determine the locations of individuals, businesses, and public assets.

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In a policy paper released on Monday, Adegbuyi proposed that the Memorandum of Understanding between NIMC and NIPOST should be expanded beyond developing a national postcode framework to create a broader digital addressing infrastructure that integrates identity, location, and public service delivery.

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Adegbuyi emphasized that a functional digital society requires trusted answers to both "who" and "where," with "identity" answering the former and "location" answering the latter.

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The former postal chief noted that postcodes alone identify geographical areas rather than specific people or properties, highlighting the significance of combining location intelligence with identity records to strengthen planning, improve service delivery, and enable government institutions to verify addresses with greater certainty.

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According to Adegbuyi, the millions of address records collected during NIN enrolment provide a foundation for such a system, which could be standardized, geocoded, and verified to create a trusted national location database without waiting for a nationwide postcode rollout to be completed.

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Adegbuyi stated that a national identity system becomes considerably more useful when the identity holder can be connected to a real-world location with measurable confidence.

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During his tenure, Adegbuyi disclosed that NIPOST had attempted a similar approach, developing a Digital Addressing System and an Address Verification System designed to combine physical addresses, digital coordinates, and identity verification into a single platform for government and commercial use.

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The project won the 2018 World Summit on the Information Society Prize, and discussions were subsequently opened with NIMC on integrating the platform with the National Identity Number database, although the proposed integration was never fully implemented.

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Adegbuyi proposed a model in which NIPOST would administer the country's official postcode system, while NIMC manages identity-linked address verification, arguing that the two institutions have complementary rather than competing responsibilities.

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He explained that NIPOST would supply the official postcode, NIMC would supply the trusted identity relationship, and address intelligence would connect, resolve, and continuously improve the information between them.

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Beyond identity management, Adegbuyi argued that verified location data could improve policing, emergency response, tax administration, social investment programmes, and logistics by allowing government agencies to accurately identify people, businesses, and infrastructure.

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He also linked the proposal to local government administration, saying councils require reliable geographic data to plan infrastructure, manage property records, improve internally generated revenue, and deliver basic services.

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Adegbuyi further argued that the country's long-term economic ambitions depend on expanding digital identity coverage and digitally mapping productive assets across the country.

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He stated that Nigeria's ambition should extend beyond connecting the NIN to a postcode, and that farms, markets, transport corridors, and businesses should become part of an integrated national digital location framework.

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Adegbuyi urged the Federal Government to encourage indigenous innovation in digital mapping technologies and equip local governments with the tools needed to maintain accurate location data.

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According to him, the challenge has evolved beyond postal administration into a broader governance issue requiring coordinated institutional action, as Nigeria's addressing challenge is not merely a postal problem, but also an identity problem, a security problem, a local government capacity problem, and a national trust problem.