2.4 million Ugandans don’t have national IDs

Kampala. At least 2.4m Ugandans aged 16 and above have not enrolled for the National Identity Cards, Daily Monitor can reveal.
These include 585,265 people whose application for National IDs has been queried because they provided insufficient and inconsistent information, or have gaps in their documentations.
The data this newspaper has obtained from the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) indicates that a total of 17,558,052 National IDs have been printed since the enrollment between 2013 when the exercise started to January 2019.
The 17,558,052 people whose National IDs have been printed are 74.05 per cent of the 23,710,691 Ugandans who have been allocated National Identification Numbers (NINs) by NIRA.
NIRA has stated that of the 23.7m people allocated NINs, there are 6,514,694 children aged between five and 15 years that were enrolled allocated NIMs from schools in 2017 and the rest are children whose data has been captured in routine birth registrations.

UBOS projection
A look into the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) population projections of 2018 which standards at 40,308,000, the number of Ugandans aged 16 and above is 20,041,600. This means that 87.6 per cent of Ugandans aged 16 years and above have had their National IDs printed.
Comparing this figure with the 17,558,052 Ugandans whose National IDs have been printed, the difference becomes, 2,483,548 people missing out. This means that these people would not appear on the National Voters Register if Uganda would go to a vote today because the Electoral Commission currently taps voter’s data from NIRA.
NIRA’s Public Relations and Corporate Affairs Manager, Mr Gilbert Kadilo, said yesterday that much as the agency has mandate to register Ugandans, the people are not taking it upon themselves to go to the enrolment centres for the day-to-day registration.
“The only massive enrolment was carried out in 2014 by the National Security Information System and it is that data that NIRA inherited in 2015 at the time of its inception. We have therefore been carrying on day-to-day registration of persons,” Mr Kadilo said.
The NIRA data indicates that, 1,453,661 birth registrations and learners applications queried. Also 705,656 applications of both children and adults have been forwarded to the districts for rectification.
Daily Monitor observed that of 17.5m National IDs that have been printed, 14,691,448 had been issued out by January 2019 leaving a pending lot of 2,234,436 cards.