The Director General of the Uganda National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA), Rosemary Kisembo, said foreigners residing in the country would begin registering for ID cards when the country rolls out its new digital ID system in the coming weeks.
Kisembo revealed the information this month while responding to NIRA-related questions in the Auditor-General’s report for the 2022/2023 financial year. He was speaking before the Parliamentary Committee on Committees, Statutory Bodies and State-Owned Enterprises (COSASE) alongside several close allies.
Uganda has not registered any foreigners legally residing in the country for the past six years, despite the Foreigners Registration Act of 2015 stating that this category of people should be registered and issued Foreigners ID cards. This situation may be contributing to foreigners unfairly obtaining Uganda biometric national ID cards.
“When the NIRA system was first developed it did not include a foreigners register,” Kisembo said, justifying the delay in registering legal foreign residents in the country, according to a Parliament Watch report.
“The software was only focused on registering citizens and adults,” she said, adding: “After the contract with the service provider expired in 2019, we won a new contract but had not yet acquired the intellectual property rights.”
The dispute Kisembo is referring to is a disagreement with Muhlbauer over alleged vendor lock-in at the printing facility for national ID cards. The new contract is a public-private partnership between Veridos and the Uganda Security Printing Company (USPC).
Members of the parliamentary committee noted that the failure to issue biometric ID cards to foreigners not only makes it difficult for them to access services that require proof of identity, but also results in a significant reduction in expected non-tax revenues from the NIRA during the 2022/2023 fiscal year.
Despite the delays, Kisembo said there is now some hope because the software to register legal foreign residents has been “embedded in the new system, which we hope to have by the end of this month.” She added that the system is an open-source system that will be tailored to the country’s ID needs. Uganda is one of the countries in the implementation stages of a MOSIP-based national ID system.
During a parliamentary committee hearing, Kisembo announced that the national ID registration and renewal process scheduled for this month has been postponed to a later date, and also explained why the country will be adding iris biometric authentication to the new generation of ID cards.
Article Topics
Biometrics | Identification | Mühlbauer | National ID | Uganda National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) | Uganda | Uganda Security Printing Company (USPC) | Veridos
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