This content on this page is in draft and shall be officially published in due course. It serves here as a guide of what to expect in the near future.
The way names are stored in digital databases and records is very inconsistent and doesn’t follow a particular pattern.
Take the case of the following 2 persons:
Person A
First name: Ibukun
Middle Name: Blessing
Surname: Emmanuel
Person B
First name: Emmanuel
Middle Name: Blessing
Surname: Ibukun
Company A may store (and present) the person’s name as Ibukun Blessing Emmanuel. You find this a lot with banking in Nigeria, where you want to transfer money to someone and Bank A will display the beneficiary’s name as Ibukun Blessing Emmanuel.
Yet Bank B will display the person’s name as Emmanuel Blessing Ibukun.
One might even find Ibukun Emmanuel Blessing as the person’s name.
So how do you ensure that there is consistency across board and people’s names are not mixed up?
It is also not proper to be addressing another person by their last name, unless one is familiar with that person. We are after all, Africans FIRST.
The NIMC shall now enforce (and penalise) any organization or entity that presents, stores or transmits personally identifiable information (or PII) that does not STRICTLY adhere to either of the following 2 naming conventions:
did.nc.01: Option A (preferred): Surname, Firstname Middlename
Example 1: Emmanuel, Ibukun Blessing
did.nc.02: Option B (altenate): Firstname Middlename Surname
Example 2: Ibukun Blessing Emmanuel
In either case, the entity shall, as a part of their adoption of the standard, shall display in square brackets ([ ]), the standard they shall be adopting (either did.nc.01 or did.nc.02).
With Option 1: Emmanuel, Ibukun Blessing [did.nc.01]
With Option 2: Ibukun Blessing Emmanuel [did.nc.02]
Where a suffix of the new Naming Convention standard is not displayed as shown above, it shall be assumed by default, that did.nc.01 was adopted, unless the comma is missing from the name, then did.nc.02 shall be presumed.
TBD