NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 24 – Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi has said the National Registration Bureau is undertaking a “robust program” geared at generating national identification cards for eligible persons to register as voters.
Matiangi revealed that the initiative commenced at the beginning of the year saying all regional offices had instructions to speed up issuance of the documents which are mandatory for registration as a voter.
He spoke during a news conference at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development in Nairobi on Monday.
“We are doing everything we can, all our national registration bureau staff are all on duty and are out and we have agreed that we are working almost 24/7 to ensure that every Kenyan who needs an ID gets an ID so that they can get a voter’s card,” Said Matiang’i.
He stated that they had instructed assistant chiefs and the Chiefs to ensure that they track down individuals who have not collected their IDs in their areas of jurisdiction and avail the document to them.
“The assistant chiefs should walk around their sub-location, sub-location is not that big in many parts of our country especially in urban areas and you can move around and some of those especially rural Kenya you can even know the families by looking at their names and so on,” he added.
Matiangi further said that based on the reports from different counties, the collection of printed IDs had gone up.
He further said that the registration exercise across the country is going on well.
This statement comes a week after the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s (IEBC) kicked off the final enhanced continuous voter registration before the August 9 polls amid a call for eligible voters who are yet to be registered to turn out and get listed.
The exercise set to conclude on February 9 was rolled out in all the 1,450 county wards across 290 constituencies on January 7.
IEBC rolled out the second phase of the Enhanced Continuous Voter Registration after the Commission failed to meet its target of registering 4.5 million new voters having only reached 800,462 new voters in October 2021.
Commission Chairperson Wafula Chebukati had earlier said that mass listing for Kenyan citizens residing in the East African Community, United Kingdom, United States of America, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, South Sudan and Germany will begin on January 21 and end on February 6.
On Monday, Kenya High Commission in London called on Kenyans in diaspora to show up and register.
