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The West African nation of Sierra Leone is at full throttle with its digital transformation efforts, and its MOSIP-based foundational identity system is the nucleus of this project.

The Modular Open Source Identity Platform (“MOSIP”) is a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that provides a platform on which all countries can build their own digital ID system “for free.”

Related: Digital IDs are being rolled out globally; from Europe to Ethiopia to Australia

On Friday, an article ‘Sierra Leone putting digital ID at the centre of its digital transformation agenda’, published by Biometric Update, reported on an interview with Sierra Leone’s National Civil Registration Authority (“NCRA”) Deputy Director Moses T.F. Vibbie.  The interview was conducted on the sidelines of a MOSIP Connect event last month in Addis Ababa.

Further reading: MOSIP, the Unneglectable Force in the Global South, Medium, 5 March 2024

Vibbie explained that the strong political will of the country’s President, Julius Maada Bio, and the dedication of the NCRA’s Director General, Mohamed Mubashir Massaquoi, are the other driving forces behind the initiative. Massaquoi is also an ambassador for ID4Africa whose foundation partners are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network.

“Foundational digital ID managed by the NCRA is at the centre of Sierra Leone’s digital transformation agenda. The National ID Card or NIN is mandatory for accessing services in Sierra Leone as enshrined in the National Civil Registration Act of 2016 (NCR Act 2016),” Vibbie said.

So far, he said, digital ID has been instrumental in the country’s ongoing government efforts as almost all government services have been digitised and linked to the digital ID.

“According to the parliament of Sierra Leone’s ratification and directives, the NIN is linked to all government and key private sector services including SIM card registration, education, government payroll, employment in public and private sectors, insurance, financial inclusion and services, vehicle registration and driver’s license, health care, pension and social security, properties and land registration and more,” he outlined. It is required for passports, work and residence permits.

Using Bill Gates’ Digital ID Platform

Sierra Leone started to implement a “modern” identity system in 2016/2017.  In 2023, the country signed a Memorandum of Understanding (“MoU”) for a national digital ID pilot built with MOSIP. The aim of this, it is said, is to establish an ID system that will respond to the specific needs of the country and enable citizens to have access to several important public and even private sector services.

“As an institution mandated by law to carry out [Civil and Vital Statistics (“CRVS”)] and ID Management activities in Sierra Leone covering both citizens and non-citizen residents, the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) aims to have a state-of-the-art ICT and Identity Management Infrastructure in place in order to provide seamless civil registration, production and dissemination of vital statistics and identity management services to and on the population of the country,” NCRA Director General Massaquoi said. “As such, working with the MOSIP Team to pilot the MOSIP DPG-based Digital Identity Platform is timely.”

Biometric Update noted that MOSIP had also recently signed an MoU with Burkina Faso and surpassed 76 million registrations across 9 jurisdictions.

MOSIP is a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that offers a “formidable solution” for digital ID for the 850 million people worldwide “who lack any acceptable form of legal identity.”  The Foundation, which is known to profiteer off the poor to enrich itself, offers its digital ID “solution” to countries “for free.”

“Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems,” the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation states on its digital ID page introducing MOSIP.

According to a 2022 article published by Devex, donors committed a total of US$295 million to the DPI cause during the 77th United Nations General Assembly. Big donors included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which committed $200 million; Norway, which committed $50 million; Germany with nearly $35 million; and the EU’s Horn of Africa Initiative, with nearly $10 million.

Digital public infrastructure is as vital in the 21st century “as railways and roads and bridges were for the 19th and 20th centuries,” said Achim Steiner, administrator of the UN Development Programme, which chaired an event during UNGA called ‘The Future of Digital Cooperation’.

“This area, using digital approaches, is probably the most helpful thing in all of development,” Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, said at the event.

Why donors are backing a global push for digital public infrastructure, Devex, 30 September 2022

Related: Western taxpayers are funding the global rollout of the controligarchs’ surveillance and control system

According to its website, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MOPSIP is supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (“Norad”), Pratiksha Trust and Tata Trusts comprising the Sir Ratan Tata Trust and allied trusts.

Interestingly, Pratiksha Trust, which was founded by Dr. Kris Gopalakrishnan – former co-chair of the World Economic Forum, the chairman of Axilor Ventures and co-founder of Infosys – and his wife Sudha Gopalakrishnan, has also “extended very generous support” to the Indian Institute of Science (“IISc”) in promoting research in brain Science, data science, and computing architectures and algorithms inspired by the brain.

Further reading: Why Kris Gopalakrishnan is spending hundreds of crores to study the human brain, Forbes, 30 May 2023

In the case of the Sir Ratan Tata Trust, the bulk of the grants awarded relate to land and water development, and microfinance; financial services targeting people and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services.

At the time of writing this article, MOPSIP had 7 national rollouts and 10 pilots in progress.

United Nations Pulling the Strings

Despite how Sierre Leone’s officials portray it, the “foundational digital ID managed by the NCRA” is an UN-controlled programme.

As Sierra Loaded explained, in 2020, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (“UNECA”) conducted a Country Assessment Report for Sierra Leone.  UNECA endorsed the NCR Act’s consolidation of CVRS functions under NCRA in line with core principles and standards of the United Nations Legal Identity initiative.

In early 2020, Sierre Leone was among nine countries selected to “benefit” from the UN Legal Identity that is jointly managed by the Government of Sierra Leone through the NCRA and the UN Agencies of UNDP, UNICEF and the UN-related International Organisation for Migration (“IOM “).

Related: Organisations that make up the UN World Government System

In October 2021, Massaquoi, NCRA Director-General, hired Anette Bayer Forsingdal, an IOM external consultant.  IOM is one of the critical partners positioned to support NCRA in the effective implementation of the UN Legal Identity Agenda in Sierra Leone. IOM is also one of the donor partners to NCRA’s efforts in implementing the UN’s digital identity agenda.

At the time, NCRA had recently concluded an internal legal review covering policies, regulations and bills to support the smooth integration of other legal policy provisions that would guide a well-functioning CRVS and ID Management system in Sierra Leone.

For her part, Bayer said she was delighted to be part of NCRA and that CRVS had worked very well in Namibia and among a few other countries in Africa.

Oligarchs are in Control

Bringing this all together, we have Sierra Leone’s National Civil Registration Authority and President pushing a digital ID system onto Sierra Leoneans that is being implemented by the UN through its consultants and “legal identity” agenda.

The Rockefellers were instrumental in establishing the UN in 1946. According to Swedish researcher and author Dr. Jacob Nordangård, the Rockefellers view the UN as their own little club or organisation.

Additionally, the personal information of perhaps hundreds of millions of people is being gathered and stored on depopulationist Bill “Vaccinate the World” Gates’ MOSIP platform; a centralised database through which controligarchs can easily control the behaviours and lives of people through reward or, more likely, punishment measures.

As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation threatened: “Digital ID systems are one of the three pillars of what’s known as digital public infrastructure (DPI); the others are digital payment systems and data exchange systems.”

What they are imposing on Sierre Leone, will, without a doubt, be replicated throughout the world, or at least they plan to try.