Beyond NIMC–NIPOST MoU: Nigeria’s missing operating layer

On August 3, 2016, the Minister of Communications introduced me to the Nigerian Postal Service’s management as Postmaster General of the Federation and Chief Executive Officer of NIPOST. I came from the private sector, the first person from that background to lead the organisation. I was convinced that a postal service defined by the movement of letters had no future. Digital commerce was expanding. Banks needed reliable customer identification. The government needed to know not just who citizens were, but where they could be found, verified and served.

Ten years later, the National Identity Management Commission and NIPOST signed a Memorandum of Understanding on postcodes. While this deserves everyone’s support, it comes with an unfinished history.

During my tenure, NIPOST ran the Digital Addressing System and Address Verification System, known internally as DAS & VAS. It connected physical addresses, digital location references, identity verification and service delivery, and in 2018 the Address Verification System won a World Summit on the Information Society Prize in the e-employment category, recognised for supporting identity verification while creating work for field agents.

I visited NIMC’s then Director-General twice to propose linking NIMC’s identity infrastructure to NIPOST’s addressing and verification system. The logic was simple: a national identity number identifies who a person is; digital addressing and verification establish where that person can reliably be reached. The National Identity Number, tied to a resolvable location, becomes more useful than either half alone.

That partnership never matured. DAS & VAS never reached the national scale its recognition suggested it deserved.

That history is recalled without bitterness and without any intention to diminish either institution’s present leadership. Public office is temporary. Institutions and ideas should outlast the administrations that first raised them. The question worth asking is not who gets credit, but whether Nigeria can build cumulatively instead of restarting the same journey under a new name every few years.

NIPOST should modernise Nigeria’s postcode system. A well-built digital postcode improves logistics, emergency response, planning and e-commerce, and nothing here argues against that mandate.

But a postcode is not the same as a digital address, and a digital address is not the same as address verification. A postcode identifies a geographic unit. A digital address makes that unit machine-readable and repeatedly resolvable to the same place. Verification establishes whether a declared address is real and, where lawful, whether a specific person is credibly connected to it. Identity-linked location intelligence goes further still, managing the history and confidence of that person-to-place relationship over time.

One building can carry a single postcode while housing several flats, shops and offices. A citizen can hold a residential address, a business address and a property address that never overlap. A person can relocate while an old address sits unchanged in a government database. A postcode does not resolve any of that on its own.

NIMC already holds millions of address entries collected at enrolment. Some are accurate. Many are not: misspelled streets, informal descriptions, missing house numbers, landmarks used in place of addresses. A human reader recognises that “12 Akinola Street” and “House 12, near the old market” describe the same location. A database does not.

Attaching a postcode to these records will not resolve that ambiguity. NIMC still has to clean, geocode, and score the confidence of what it already holds, and it can start that work today rather than waiting for a nationwide postcode rollout to finish.

The path is not complicated: normalise the raw address field, geocode it, resolve it against the correct state, local government area, ward and community, assign it a deterministic reference, score the confidence of the match, and let the citizen confirm or correct uncertain results. None of this requires NIMC to become a postcode authority or compete with NIPOST. It requires NIMC to treat the address field it already owns as infrastructure rather than as inert text.

NIPOST supplies the official postcode. NIMC maintains the trusted identity relationship and transforms the address data it already holds. Where a postcode exists, it enriches NIMC’s record. Where one does not yet exist or has not been matched, NIMC’s own resolution work still tells the government where a person most likely is. This is properly layered Digital Public Infrastructure, where two institutions do what each is positioned to do, without either waiting on the other.

The work that began around NIPOST DAS & VAS did not end when I left public office. The frustration of an initiative does not eliminate the problem it was intended to solve. In my case, it led to deeper investigation of the relationship among identity, geography, addressing, verification, local governance and service delivery.

That continuing work has produced related Nigerian innovations:

SmartGrid7 explores highly granular geographic organisation, including the use of polling-unit geography for targeting, monitoring and auditing social-welfare interventions.

NINjaMap addresses the need for Nigerian-controlled geocoding and location intelligence that can interpret local addresses, landmarks, communities, informal settlements, and routes.

CRYLID, the Cryptographic Real You Location Identifier, is directed at creating a secure and privacy-conscious relationship between a real person and a verifiable location.

SPMB, Small Plaques with Mighty Benefits, creates a physical trust endpoint through which a building, household, business, or service point can be connected to authorised digital services.

DG-WWS-NDAS converts inconsistent and dormant institutional address fields into normalized, geocoded, deterministic, and machine-readable location intelligence.

These are stages of one progression: postal reform, digital addressing, verification, geographic granularity, mapping, cryptographic identity, physical trust endpoints, location-aware infrastructure.

Every security incident happens somewhere. Every vulnerable household lives somewhere. Every farm sits on land that can be located or cannot. The government cannot protect, insure, tax, or serve what it cannot reliably find.

Applied to security, resolvable location speeds up incident reporting and responder routing. Applied to welfare, it shows which households were actually reached and where gaps remain. Applied to agriculture, it connects farmers to inputs, storage, insurers and buyers. Applied to trade and the National Single Window, it ties customs documentation to the real warehouses, ports and transit points goods move through. Applied to oil and gas, it can improve the consistent identification of wells, pipelines, flow stations, metering points, spill locations and host-community obligations. It also creates work: community geospatial officers, address verification agents, mapping stewards, physical trust-endpoint installers.

It is even more crucial for the successful operationalisation of the local government fiscal autonomy policy. People live, work, farm and trade inside local government areas. Fiscal autonomy without data merely decentralises inefficiency; a local government that cannot locate its settlements, businesses, farms and vulnerable households does not yet have the machinery to govern, however much money reaches its account. SmartGrid7 supplies the planning units, NINjaMap the local geographic intelligence, CRYLID the trusted identity-location link, SPMB the visible service endpoint. The relevant question is not whether local government gets autonomy. It is autonomy to do what, using which data, under what accountability structure.

Location-driven policy is also crucial to Mr. President’s ambition of growing Nigeria’s economy to $1tn. A one-trillion-dollar economy will not come from federal policy or large corporations alone. It comes from farms, markets, workshops and businesses across 774 local government areas, and a business that cannot be reliably located is harder to finance, insure or connect to a supply chain. A farm that cannot be resolved is harder to support. A community invisible in government data stays underserved. Location intelligence converts that invisibility into formal recognition, access to credit, insurability and fairer taxation. It will not build the economy on its own, but that ambition is difficult to imagine without it.

This article argues for the need to build trusted national infrastructure where identity, postcodes, addresses, and public services work as one system instead of parallel ones.

The NIMC-NIPOST MoU deserves support, but Nigeria’s ambition should not stop at attaching a postcode to a National Identity Number. Local governments should be equipped to see their own territory because smart governance starts where Nigerians actually live. To govern locally, the government first has to see locally. That is the assignment DAS & VAS left unfinished ten years ago, and it remains open; Nigerian innovators in this space should get a fair hearing. It would demonstrate that Nigerian innovation can survive beyond public office. Most importantly, it would be a win for Nigeria.

Some systems described in this article are embodied in existing patented and proprietary Nigerian technologies developed by the author and associated entities. Public discussion of these ideas does not waive those rights or dedicate the inventions to the public domain.

Chief Bisi Adegbuyi is a former Postmaster General of the Federation