• State will know its population through registration
• Exercise could not start in Kisumu, Lamu, Tana River and Kwale on Wednesday due to technical problems
Information collected during the Huduma Namba registration is protected from unauthorised access, Interior PS Karanja Kibicho said yesterday.
Kibicho said registering in the National Integrated Identity Management System is not mandatory and there are sufficient laws to protect the personal details obtained from misuse.
The PS said the law forbids any unauthorised access to the information, adding that the law provides a five-year jail term or Sh10 million fine for misuse of the information.
The registration for the Huduma Namba will help the government in planning as it will help the state have a consistent and updated digital population record.
For instance, the PS said, the government will be able to know the number of children expected to be joining Standard 1 and those completing Standard 8 using the NIIMS details, instead of trying to find out during the audit for transition.
The digital registration will also enable the state to know its population through the centralised register.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission had earlier said many people will be locked out of access to government services if the access is tied to the Huduma Namba.
KHRC programmes officer Diana Gichengo said there are Kenyans still struggling with obtaining a national ID and are subjected to lengthy vetting and the NIIMS could place a bigger hurdle for them.
“We are receiving worrying reports about threats to withhold salaries and other benefits to members of the public for exercising their legal rights to boycott this exercise,” Gichengo said.
She said coercing anyone to register is a violation of the law and contempt of the April 1 High Court ruling which said it cannot be mandatory. Collecting DNA is prohibited.
Kibicho said the registration is voluntary. He said the registration under NIIMS failed to start in four counties on Wednesday due to technical challenges.
The counties are Kisumu, Lamu, Tana River and Kwale. The registration is ongoing across the 8,500 sublocations in the country and each sublocation has at least three registration kits.
The government has deployed 42,000 registration assistants who are carrying out the exercise jointly with the 8,500 assistant chiefs as the primary officers.
They are assisted by ICT experts deployed to support the registration. On Wednesday, 11,000 registration assistants were not able to use the kits, slowing down the exercise.
Network coverage also caused delays in some counties. The PS said, however, the people who turned up for registration found slow queues because the registration assistants are learning to use the kits.
Kibicho said there was tremendous improvement yesterday in the management of the kits' operations, for example, digital fingerprints registration.
“We had banked on the fact that we had provided online availability, given that these are not security forms and had thought people would fill them offsite and bring them to the registration centres,” he said.
He said the papers distributed were finished but 30 million copies will be distributed to registration centres by Sunday.