You're giving away real power by failing to collect your ID
What you need to know:
- Members of Parliament also had a debate to decentralise and fast-track the issuance of ID cards at county level.
- Karanja Kibicho, the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Interior, sent out an appeal for Kenyans to come and collect over 375, 000 IDs that were ready in different parts of the country.
- One Member of Parliament said that while she got her passport in two days, her ID took two years to come.
A National Identity Card, issued to Kenyans when they become adults, is an essential part of being a citizen.
We tend only to hear about the lack of IDs during election period, but should that be the case? Is an identity card only a prerequisite for voting? Is getting a voter’s card the only reason to get an identity card?
The tiny plastic card does not look very impressive. Indeed it has not changed much since it’s last revision, but just gotten smaller.
Just what does an ID do? If you think about how often you produce an ID, you realise how empowered a citizen is with an ID card, or how disempowered one is without it.
With an ID, you can collect and send Mpesa. You can give instructions to the bank. You can collect cheques, packages, statements and office mail.
You can access government buildings and get treated at a hospital. You can cross the border to Uganda and Rwanda.
Without an ID, you can’t do any of these things. You also can’t get a loan or buy or rent property. You can’t get a job, and you can’t access a job site.
In fact, you can’t marry and you can’t die without an ID, because you have to surrender your ID back to the government in order to get a death certificate.
You also can’t vote without an ID or a passport The recent vote registration period gave some urgency to the ID card process, and some leaders attributed the lower-than-expected voter registration to a lack of ID cards.
About 24 million Kenyans have ID cards, and to its credit the government has tried to issue more.
Karanja Kibicho, the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Interior, sent out an appeal for Kenyans to come and collect over 375, 000 IDs that were ready in different parts of the country, but which the owners had not collected.
Members of Parliament also had a debate to decentralise and fast-track the issuance of ID cards at county level, as they argued that processing them in Nairobi was lengthy and made it difficult to get ID cards.
One Member of Parliament said that while she got her passport in two days, her ID took two years to come. Some MPs have even organised drives and paid for citizens to turn up and get their ID cards.
I asked an MP friend who has arranged ID drives in his constituency about this and he said that while a quarter of the IDs they had applied for had not come, another quarter were there, sitting at the chief’s offices waiting to be collected.
He was mystified and also worried that young people in his constituency had no interest in collecting their ID cards, and attributed this to them not having a sense of belonging or a connection with Kenya's system or society.
Instead, they were ostracised and disengaged, and that was scary, that even if they got an ID they would not do anything while feeling that way.
Perhaps it's time more leaders addressed the other benefits of possessing an identity card for younger people, in addition to being eligible to vote.
Twitter: @bankelele
