Congestion and long queues at Nigeria’s National Identity Commission (NIMC) offices have prompted the body to ask citizens to use its online system.

The commission said it was battling to handle the number of applicants at its offices daily for physical ID registrations.

Director general of the commission, Chris Onyemenam, has therefore urged people to first use the online system for the preliminary stage of the registration.

He said the agency’s online portal is capable of accommodating ‘40 million users’.

Onyemenam added that the pre-enrolment portal is a simplified version of the enrolment form and was created by the agency for citizens in Nigeria and the diaspora to complete their demographic enrolment before going to an enrolment centre for biometric capture.

He stressed that demographic aspects of enrolment are better conducted online.

The NIMC executive explained that the resolution of the fingerprint takes time and that those who made use of the internet portal spent less time than when they came into enrolment centres for their demographics.

According to him, people only had to come to the enrolment centre for their biometrics data capture.

“We created a user friendly interface through the Internet for citizens to conclude their demographic enrolment.

"By that, they supply information like their names, surnames, sex, gender, dates of birth and details of next of kin, occupational status and so on and so forth,” he added.

The commission’s has a capacity to enroll 20,000 people per day.