Authors: Victor Iwuoha & Martin Doevenspeck | Published: 2025 | Journal: Review of African Political Economy, Volume 52, Issue 185, pp. 313–341 | DOI: 10.62191/ROAPE-2025-0021 | Open Access
Abstract
Countries in the Global South are engaging and building strong relationships with powerful global organisations and big tech corporations, based on a profitable digital cooperation. This article explains this emerging trend using the concept of biometric coloniality of power, to show how techno-capitalist biometric identification interventions in the new biometric states in the Global South replicate colonial relations of dominance. It draws on Nigeria's experience to illustrate the utilisation of social hierarchies and biometric categories in the state-sponsored exclusion and disempowerment of the most vulnerable groups. The article argues that the rise of biometric states is associated with the political instrumentalisation of personal data, resulting in social conflict. Digital subjects confront and negotiate a deeply imbricated biometric power structure. The article concludes that biometric states are complicit in multinational corporations' monopolistic siege of Africa's digital market, which allows for the unrestricted capture of digital data through ongoing digital commodification and dispossession.
Introduction and Theoretical Framework
The article introduces and deploys the concept of biometric coloniality to explain a new formation of power in the Global South. The authors draw on Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power — the reproduction of colonial knowledge and the enhancement of unequal relationships that objectify the "other." They extend this to the digital realm, showing the manifestation of external domination over the digital sector of the Global South.
Biometric coloniality is defined as a set of practical ways by which colonial knowledge, institutions, and subject-object classifications are reproduced through biometric identification systems. The concept identifies four key actors in the digital ID ecosystem:
- The global digital empire — dominant geopolitical players who enforce global biometricisation and digitalisation. Three principal powers are identified: the European Union, the United States, and China. Others include the World Bank, UNDP, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Despite divergent competing interests, a digital consensus prevails among these key players.
- Biometric states — governments in the Global South that adopt biometric ID programmes under pressure from or in alliance with the global digital empire. Nigeria is the primary case study.
- Tech companies — multinational corporations that provide the technical infrastructure, data systems, and algorithms of biometric identification. These companies benefit commercially from the expansion of biometric ID.
- Data subjects (digital subjects) — the citizens enrolled in biometric systems, who are simultaneously the target of digital governance and potential agents of resistance.
The Global Digital Empire and Digital Consensus
The digital consensus among powerful external players is central to the analysis. The World Bank, under its ID4D (Identification for Development) programme, estimates that digital identification and civil registration will cost US$6 billion globally. This programme provides finance, technical standards, technologies, and digital infrastructures as an "all-in-one subscription package" to ID4D countries, including Nigeria.
The digital consensus turns into considerable advantage for powerful external interests who carry out techno-capitalist digital interventions in biometric states. Despite the competition between the EU, US, and China for digital influence in Africa, they share a common interest in expanding the reach of biometric identification — each for reasons related to commercial access, security surveillance, migration control, and geopolitical positioning.
The article notes that data protection laws remain weak or absent across much of Africa. This legal vacuum is not accidental — it facilitates the extraction and commodification of African citizens' biometric data.
The Biometric State in Nigeria
Nigeria is one of the most heavily biometrically documented populations in the world. Multiple state agencies run overlapping biometric systems:
- National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) — the NIN (National Identification Number)
- Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) — voter registration
- Central Bank of Nigeria — BVN (Bank Verification Number)
- Nigerian Communications Commission — SIM card registration linked to NIN
- Immigration, Customs, Police — each with their own databases
This multiplicity creates what the authors call biometric dysfunctionality: the systems are expensive, poorly coordinated, prone to fraud, and exclusionary in practice. Yet each new system is promoted as a solution to the failures of the previous one.
The much-lauded "ghost worker" elimination — removing thousands of fictitious workers from government payrolls through biometric verification — is acknowledged as a genuine benefit. However, the authors argue the overall outcome is disturbing: biometric ID accelerates profiling, surveillance, and control of people's lives and mobility. It enhances technical dependence on external providers and deepens the extraction of value from African citizens' bodies and data.
Citizenship Exclusion and Disempowerment
A central empirical concern is the exclusionary effects of biometric systems on the most vulnerable. The article shows how social hierarchies — class, gender, disability, geography, ethnicity — are reproduced and intensified through biometric categorisation.
Biometric systems require:
- Physical presence at enrolment centres (disadvantages rural and mobility-impaired populations)
- Legible biometric markers (disadvantages manual workers whose fingerprints are degraded, elderly populations)
- Digital literacy and access to smartphones for verification (disadvantages the digitally excluded)
- Linkage to formal financial and legal systems (excludes those in informal economies)
The result is that biometric systems designed for "financial inclusion" frequently deepen exclusion of the very populations they claim to serve. People denied NIN cannot access government services, receive salaries, operate bank accounts, or use mobile phones — all of which have been legally tied to biometric registration in Nigeria.
Digital Subjects and Resistance
The article does not present digital subjects as purely passive victims. It documents and theorises forms of biometric agency and resistance. The authors identify what they call "critical biometric consciousness" — an emerging awareness among Nigerian citizens of the ways biometric systems reproduce colonial power structures.
Forms of resistance documented include:
- Refusal or evasion of enrolment
- Community-level information sharing about data risks
- Civil society and legal challenges to mandatory biometric registration
- Popular protest against the erasure of rights (e.g., the linkage of mobile SIM deactivation to NIN non-compliance)
Key Arguments
- Biometric coloniality as framework: Colonial relations of domination are reproduced through digital ID systems.
- Digital consensus: Major global powers, multilateral institutions, and major foundations share a common interest in expanding biometric identification in the Global South, disadvantaging African governments and citizens.
- Biometric state character: The biometric state is an active collaborator in the biometric objectification of its own citizens — because biometric ID programmes serve state interests in surveillance, population control, and access to international finance.
- Biometric dysfunctionality: The multiplicity of overlapping systems, poor coordination, fraud, exclusion, and data breaches are structural characteristics, not incidental failures.
- Complicity in digital dispossession: Biometric states are complicit in multinational corporations' monopolistic control of Africa's digital market.
Conclusion
The article concludes that Nigeria is one of many sites of biometric colonialism in the Global South. Coalitions of strong foreign organisations, big tech firms, and new compliant biometric states function on the basis of a profitable digital consensus to carry out techno-capitalist interventions that reproduce colonial forms of domination. The unequal patterns of power — through control of data on faces, bodies, preferences, and financial means — are developing across local, national, and global spaces. The chain of unbridled digital data extraction, commodification, and dispossession can only be broken by the conscious awakening of digital subjects.
This article summary is prepared by the IOCSS Journal Monitor. Available Open Access at ScienceOpen. Review of African Political Economy, Volume 52, Issue 185, 2025.