No online ID registration for Ugandans in diaspora

Jul 15, 2014

UGANDANS living in the diaspora will have to come home to register for national IDs as the deadline for the mass enrollment exercise draws near

By Moses Walubiri

UGANDANS living in the diaspora will have to come home to register for national IDs as the deadline for the mass enrollment exercise draws near. 

The ongoing mass enrolment at parish level is set to end on August 11 and will be replaced with the continuous ID registration at Sub County level. 

According to Ministry of Internal Affairs spokesperson, Pamela Ankunda, affording the Ugandan diaspora a cost saving opportunity to register online or completing the ID registration process at Uganda’s missions abroad is not an option because of the need to capture their bio data.

“The national ID is going to be machine readable because it will have the bio data of the holder. It will also be used in issuing new passports that conform to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards,” Ankunda told New Vision when asked why Ugandan passport holders in the diaspora shouldn’t be issued with national IDs. 

Ankunda revealed that the current Ugandan passports “do not meet international standards,” and as such cannot be used as a basis to issue national IDs. 

ICAO, of which Uganda is a member, set 2015 as the deadline for all member countries to issue machine readable passports to its citizens.

Such passports are embedded with an electronic chip that carries the bio data of the holder. 

“In the future, government is open to having Ugandans in the diaspora complete ID registration, as it is with passports, at our missions abroad. But the current exercise has no such option because we are using parish citizen verification committees to ascertain citizenship,” Ankunda said. 

The Ugandan community in the diaspora is estimated to be over 200,000, with their annual remittances back home breaching the $1b (sh2.6 trillion) mark two years ago. 

Of these, according to Uganda’s High Commissioner to United Kingdom, Prof. Joyce Kikafunda, an estimated 55,000 reside in the British Isles. 

Because of their increased contribution to Uganda’s economic development, Ugandans in the diaspora have recently increased their demand for a greater stake in the country of their birth, including a clamour for mechanisms that can afford them to cast their votes during general elections at Uganda’s missions abroad.

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