Seven of ECOWAS’s fifteen member states have now deployed the ECOWAS National Biometric Identity Card (ENBIC), and the bloc says every member state has committed to mutual acceptance of the card at air, land and sea borders by December 2026.
But at a media sensitisation workshop held in Lagos yesterday, the message from ECOWAS, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) suggested that hitting that deadline depends on something less technical than border infrastructure: whether Nigerian journalists explain the card correctly to the public.
The ENBIC replaces the old handwritten ECOWAS Travel Certificate with a single, machine-readable document, letting immigration officers verify a traveller’s identity electronically instead of checking paper credentials by hand.
Acquiring the card costs N35,000. Officials describe it as the practical delivery mechanism for a set of much bigger commitments: the ECOWAS Free Movement Protocol, which gives citizens the legal right to live in any member state; the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration; and Nigeria’s own push to tighten migration governance.
In other words, the treaties already promise free movement, as the card is what’s supposed to make that promise actually work at a border post.
That gap between policy and practice was the real subject of Thursday’s workshop. ECOWAS‘s Director of Free Movement of Persons, Migration, and Tourism, Obinna Ajugwo, traced the card back to its origin — endorsed by ECOWAS Heads of State and Government to address identity-management gaps, irregular migration, and cross-border crime as mobility across the bloc increased.
He was explicit that the card’s meaning goes beyond logistics:
“The ENBIC is not just a card. It is a symbol of belonging.”
Ajugwo argued the card would strengthen border management and deepen regional security cooperation, but was careful to frame none of that as automatic; success, he said, rests on trust and accurate information, with the media positioned as the bridge between institutions and citizens, and misinformation as the thing that could undo the card’s benefits before they’re felt.
The IOM’s Lagos sub-office head, Ali Ibrahim, tied the ENBIC to the same Global Compact language and to Nigeria’s wider border-governance efforts, but reframed how success should be measured, not by how many cards get issued, but by whether the card demonstrably improves safety, integration, economic opportunity and the travel experience for citizens crossing ECOWAS borders. It’s a measure that shifts the pressure from paperwork onto results.
Representing NIS, Assistant Comptroller-General T. O. Olaiya was the most direct about what’s at stake. She called the card’s adoption a watershed moment for regional integration, but stressed that NIS cannot deliver a project this size without the press’s help translating it for the public while warning plainly about the cost of getting the story wrong.
“Misinformation at points of entry benefits no one”, she said.
Seven countries down, eight to go, with just over a year left before the bloc’s own December 2026 deadline, Thursday’s workshop made clear that ECOWAS sees the card’s remaining obstacle as less about hardware at the border and more about whether the story reaching ordinary Nigerians is the accurate one.
