Many pitfalls await those who wish to register as Kenyans
What you need to know:
- Every time I have this discussion with friends and colleagues of Somali or coastal origin, they make me feel like a tribalist, regionalist and a person who supports discrimination based on religion.
- I, on the other hand, argue that the government may have good reason to look at all of us with a fine tooth comb when registering citizens.
- At the Westlands DO’s compound, where registration takes place, queues are longer than those of the infamous Kanu-era mlolongo system.
In any system, be it a company or a government, there is always room to improve.
I am surprised, therefore, that not much has changed in the Registration of Persons Department, which issues national identity cards, since I was registered more years ago than I can count on both my fingers and toes.
When nothing in a system changes for the better over 20 years, there is a huge problem.
It makes sense to register a person at birth and to use the number given to track that individual for life. Every time I have this discussion with friends and colleagues of Somali or coastal origin, they make me feel like a tribalist, regionalist and a person who supports discrimination based on religion.
They say they are unjustly treated when it comes to acquiring national identity cards. I, on the other hand, argue that the government may have good reason to look at all of us with a fine tooth comb when registering citizens.
TWO HUNDRED YOUNG PEOPLE
I am fully aware that in 2016, there are Kenyans who cannot access medical care and prenatal services, meaning the registration of their children may well fall out of government records, be they manual or computerised.
Yet this reality does not prevent the government from rethinking the entire ID acquisition process. It is tedious, annoying, cumbersome and does very little to prevent aliens from registering as citizens of Kenya.
A youth I know went to register recently. At the Westlands District Officer’s compound, where registration takes place, queues are longer than those of the infamous Kanu-era mlolongo system. You queue behind two hundred other young people just to get a form.
At least when I registered back then, some government employee walked along the line issuing the form, efficiently dissolving the line in minutes, but not so now. An askari walks around, threatening the youth with tear gas and a beating if they step out of line.
Who on earth trains these askaris to make Kenyans queue in a manner that completely contradicts the rules of decency, and what is the yelling all about? Authority does not require anybody to shout.
The form still requires one to provide the original IDs of both parents. At this point, I fear for applicants from single-parent households, or applicants who have lost one or both parents.
The modern family’s fluid living arrangements, in which couples often bring together children from previous marriages, also make meeting such requirements more difficult.
Most ridiculously, those forms still have to be signed by your local chief. Was the entire provincial administration, under which chiefs fall, not to be abolished?
SINGLE VISIT TO THE CHIEF
Upcountry, the chief signing off sounds reasonable, even logical, but in an urban environment it is preposterous at best. Young people from Westlands and Lavington are being asked to go to Kangemi for the signature of someone who cannot confirm anything about them in this lifetime.
I have no doubt that many urban children make that single visit to a chief they have never seen and will never see again, just for the purpose of acquiring an ID.
Obviously there are too many lose ends in our paper Constitution that do not correspond to on-the-ground realities. Isn’t there a more efficient way to confirm the identity of these young people? Why carry forward a system that may have outlived its usefulness?
Let me not describe the goings-on at the chief’s camp. Lost children, including one-day-old infants, are crying in one corner, with battered wives in another and all form and manner of domestic and public violence is being reported here. For many of our youth, it serves as a rough introduction to adult life.
If Kenya had a centralised system for recording the births of children, information on every child would already be held in the system, minimising the number of documents required when acquiring an ID. Your father and mother would already be a matter of record from birth.
In these circumstances, no chief will need to sign and stamp your form, no matter how much ink the government has in stock. Fifty years after independence, there just has to be a better, more efficient way.
Twitter: @muthonithangwa
