Lagos Begins Distribution of Permanent Residents’Cards –

LAGOS—Following  successful registration of over three million residents, the Lagos State Resident Registration Agency, LASRRA, has concluded plans to distribute  Permanent Residents’ Cards, PRC, to those captured from Friday next week.

Meantime, as part of effort to curb the increasing cases of kidnapping  in the state, the state government has charged residents to register with LASRRA to make the job of tracking criminals easy.

The General Manager, LASRRA, Ms. Olayinka Fashola made the appeal after presenting awards of recognition to some registered residents in line with the customary recognition of every landmark 100th registration.

While lamenting the low turn-out of residents for the registration exercise, Fashola stated, “Of the over 20 million residents of the state, only three million have been captured since the exercise started two years ago.”

She noted, “Many residents of the state were so busy that we had to sometimes visit them in their offices to register them.”

Fashola said the agency has sophisticated infrastructure to assist the police and other security agencies in the area of crime investigations.

She said, “We can actually identify people with the infrastructure we have in LASSRA. So with the kidnapping incident that involved the Orekoya family in Lagos in which their house maid kidnapped their children, we could actually verify if that lady is who she said she was.

“We have facial recognition application where if we have a good photograph of her we can quickly run through our system and verify if that was her. From there we can look at her address. From what we have gathered most people register with someone else, so we could have looked at the registration before and after to see if the addresses are the same.