Political Economy of Digital Identity Systems and National Security Governance in Nigeria

Résumé

Over the past decade, digital identity systems have become central instruments of governance in developing countries, promoted by international institutions as tools for financial inclusion, service delivery, and national security. Nigeria's National Identification Number (NIN) programme, backed by over $430 million in World Bank financing, represents one of Africa's most ambitious biometric identity projects, enrolling over 121 million citizens by June 2025 and enforcing mandatory NIN-SIM card linkage across the study period. Despite this substantial infrastructure expansion, national security outcomes remained poor during the same period. Kidnapping for ransom and armed banditry intensified, with independent monitoring organizations documenting thousands of victims during peak enforcement. Existing scholarship has not adequately examined why expanded state capacity for citizen data collection failed to translate into improved security governance, nor has it applied an integrated political economy framework to analyze the distributional and institutional dimensions of Nigeria's digital identity project. This study investigates the political economy of Nigeria's digital identity expansion, examining how resource allocation decisions, institutional incentives, bureaucratic competition, and elite interests shaped both implementation and outcomes between 2019 and 2025.The study employs a descriptive research design, drawing on systematic content analysis of government policy documents, World Bank project reports, security incident data from independent monitoring organizations, and digital rights publications. Michael Mann's theory of infrastructural power and the Political Economy Approach provide the analytical framework. While Nigeria expanded digital identity infrastructure, achieving enhanced data collection capacity as one dimension of infrastructural power, this expansion did not produce corresponding improvements in institutional coordination or operational effectiveness. Security agencies gained unprecedented surveillance capacity but lacked training, inter-agency cooperation, and analytical infrastructure to convert data into actionable intelligence. Implementation served the interests of technology vendors, state agencies, and political elites more than citizens, producing systematic exclusion among rural and marginalized populations. Nigeria's digital identity project exemplifies isomorphic mimicry, building the outward form of modern state capacity without developing its substance. Genuine security improvement requires institutional reform, anti-corruption measures, and coordinated governance, not technological investment alone. These findings have significant implications for digital identity policy across sub-Saharan Africa.