Large crowds gathered at the offices of the National Identity Management Commission in Lagos on Monday in a bid to register and obtain the National Identity Number.
The development comes just days after the Nigerian Communication Commission ordered telecommunications companies to within two weeks suspend phone subscribers who have no NIN.
Currently, only about 41.5 million Nigerians out of an estimated 198 million active phone subscribers have NIN.
Most of the people, who gathered at the NIMC office in Alausa, were either not wearing face masks or not observing physical distancing, thereby flouting the protocol put in place by the government in a bid to tackle the spread of COVID-19 which has been on the increase in the last one week.