Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen announced on Friday announced that Kenyans will automatically be issued identity cards (ID) upon turning 18 years old based on data collected from birth.
He was speaking at the Lake Naivasha Simba Lodge where he cited the recent controversial lifting of the ID vetting system for the communities along the border counties by President William Ruto.
“We are a ministry that is extremely responsible for the security of this country and we cannot play with the security. We are also responsible for ensuring that Kenyans enjoy rights equally without undue discrimination,” he stated.
“The fact that we removed extra vetting does not mean that we have compromised on security of the country. The process that we are going to apply now of identifying who has gotten an ID or who has not, is to leverage the existing data across the board to know who you are.”
Adding: “We have your information from when you went to school, when you went for services, of your family, family tree across and so you can’t just come and say ‘I want to be a citizen.’ We will see who is your mother, father, sister, uncle…Technology will assist us in these things.”
He further clarified that the vetting exercise was not only domiciled in Northern Kenya or on the Kenya-Somali border.
“I want to dissuade all Kenyans not to think about this as about North Eastern or border with Somalia. Don’t think that this policy was applied to one corner of the country; it is not true,” he said.
“It is applying to all corners of the country, from Tanzania in Lunga Lunga to our border in Turkana with both South Sudan and Uganda to our border in Ethiopia then Somalia.”
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