The Huduma Namba story has always been a sore thumb for the majority of Kenyans because it has never been explained well for every Tom, Dick and Harry.
The registration exercise was conducted in early 2019, and after many, many months, those who registered have not been issued with the card.
The second registration phase is also rumoured to start before the end of 2020.
Huduma Namba, for the umpteenth time, is a system that seeks to register all Kenyans under a new database. The registration process requires a ton of information from the user, including biometric data. The need for all that information has been questioned, probably because at the registration time, the state did not have any Data Protection laws (the Data Protection Bill was signed in late 2019, and has since seen the establishment of the Data Commissioner office).
Those who registered will now be given their cards after more than a year in waiting.
The announcement has just been made the ICT CS Joe Mucheru, who says that issuance will start from December 1.
There is no word about when the registration process will resume. However, with the pandemic around, it is not quite clear if the exercise will be postponed up to that time when virus will be under control.
Lastly, Mucheru has also revealed that the Huduma Namba card will phase out the National ID.
At first, people had complained of having documents that do the same thing, and have near similar personal information.
The national IDs will stop being functional from December 12, 2021.
This effectively means that registration is mandatory, not optional as the High Court had ruled sometime in April 2019.
