President William Ruto has ordered his government to make sure that the stalled Huduma Namba project is actualised by the end of the year.
“The Huduma-thing that never was must be a success. It’s not the work of the government to issue identification numbers, it is the work of the government to identify the citizens,” said the President.
The project was initiated during Uhuru’s regime in order to harmonise approaches that seek to address duplication of efforts and to cut costs in registration processes.
Through Executive Order No. 1 (2018), former President Uhuru Kenyatta established the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS) program whose mandate is to manage Kenyans’ identification structures.
“The purpose of this initiative is to create and manage a central master population database which will be the ‘single source of truth’ on a person’s identity,” the Ministry of ICT explained on its website.
However, Uhuru’s flagship project seemed to have stalled just months before the 2022 General Election.
By then a total of 37.7 million Kenyans had already been registered under the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS).