Government says won't recall 'faulty' national IDs

  According to NIDA, over 21 million bona fide Tanzanians aged 18 and above will have been issued with the identification cards by year's end

 The government has said it doesn’t intend to recall around 2 million electronically-produced national identity cards issued to citizens so far despite widespread complaints that the ID cards are flawed, saying instead that the cards will be rolled out to all eligible Tanzanians by the end of the year.

 

In an interview with The Guardian in Dar es Salaam yesterday, the Minister for Home Affairs, Charles Kitwanga, described the technology used to produce the disputed national IDs as ‘state-of-the-art’, and said more of the same cards would be issued by the National Identification Authority (NIDA) to over 21 million bona fide citizens aged 18 and above.

 

The national IDs have lately become a subject of rising debate and some dispute, especially after President John Magufuli personally faulted them in public as being poor ‘value for money’ due to the absence of some key features like signatures of card holders.

 

Magufuli suspended the NIDA director general, Dickson Maimu, and four other officials last month to pave the way for a thorough  investigation on procurement processes after it was found that a total of Tshs 179.6 billion/- had questionably been spent on the far-from-completed national IDs project so far.

 

The president slammed the pace of the project, pointing out that the National Electoral Commission (NEC) had spent less than Tshs 70bn/- in producing 22.7 million voters’ registration cards, complete with card holders’ signatures, compared to NIDA’s Tshs 179.6bn/- expenditure on just 2.2 million ID cards.

 

There have been complaints of several local institutions, including commercial banks, rejecting the new national ID cards as an acceptable form of identification for individuals in the same manner as passports, driver licenses, voter cards or even pension membership cards, mainly due to the lack of signatures.

 

But according to minister Kitwanga, each national ID does have the signature of the holder and other personal information embedded on the inside, which requires a smart-card detector and not a conventional barcode reader to access the personal details. “The technology used to produce the national ID cards is very modern while most of our local banks are still using old technology,” he said.

 

The minister told The Guardian that he had instructed the acting NIDA director general, Dr Modestus Kipilimba, to help identify smart-card detectors and other devices compatible with the national IDs so they can be adopted by local banks and other institutions.

 

Kipilimba was the director of risk management at the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) before being appointed to replace Maimu at NIDA.

 

According to the NIDA website, the authority has so far registered about 6.3 million people in Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Coast, Lindi, Mtwara, Morogoro and Tanga regions for the national identification process and issued around 2.2 million ID cards to confirmed citizens.

 

The cards reportedly have an internal chip carrying the holder’s personal details that can be updated at any time. The chip also contains other information like driving licence details, passport and social security membership numbers.

 

The national ID cards are expected to offer a number of economic, social and security benefits not only to Tanzanians as individuals, but to the state at large. These include widening the tax base, identifying loan defaulters, controlling fraud, improving the national census and updating of the permanent voters’ register.