The Auditor General, John Muwanga has raised concern on the unclaimed national identification cards that lay idle at the various offices of National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) with many of them nearing their expiry dates in 2025.
In his December 2020 report to Parliament, the Auditor General raised concern with the continued reliance of manual processing of national IDs, despite the heavy investments in ICT solutions, yet the ID registration process is still manual, where application or registration cannot take place without a manual file.
Muwanga raised concern over the unnecessary delays in the transfer of information from the registration kit to the server, pointing out that the filled data is uploaded onto the server at the end of the day if not week depending on the availability of the Information Technology Officer (ITO) District Registration Officer (DRO); sometimes, it will require for an ITO from the neighbouring district to do the upload before getting to the central server for processing.
He said, “The upload of a filled application to the central server is done using a flash disk, which is prone to theft and errors at the enrolment and processing/ decoding using the manual server upload. Over 10,806,384IDs had not been processed, especially the IDs that require verification by the committee and over 13,650,427million IDs had not been picked/issued by clients, some date as far back as 2014. It should be noted that all the IDs are due to expire in 2025.”
The report warned that the stated gaps have led to extended delays in processing NIDs, which are likely to prevent the Authority from delivering its mandate and the undelivered cards may expire before issuance.
Management acknowledged that it was true that the current system was offline between the kit and the district server, and it was because at the time of acquisition of the current NSIS system connectivity infrastructure in Uganda had a limitation.
However, the Auditor General advised NIRA Management to consider automating citizen registration processes during the implementation of the new system and fast-track issuance of the cards.
The development comes at the time NIRA is slated to embark on second phase of national wide issuance of IDs slated for July 2022 and the exercise is projected to cost over Shs57Bn.
