Nida executive director said in Dar es Salaam that the process of engaging the company that would produce the IDs was in the final stages.
The $176 million (about Sh200 billion) project has been delayed for decades now with documents, meetings and tendering moving from one office to the other. And now it has attracted the international community, including the World Bank.
Currently, five companies have been cleared for the final stage of the tender competition from which the authority will select one to start designing and making the ID cards.
At a meeting with editors of various media houses in Dar es Salaam, Mr Maimu said the companies were all foreign. But, once the foreign company wins the tender it may be required to partner with a local company, he said, explaining:
"If nothing will interfere with our efforts, it is our hope that by the end of this year we will start giving out the national identity cards."
He said the signing of the East African Common Market protocol prompted the country to rush for implementation of the project as only Tanzania and Uganda were yet to have national IDs in the whole region.
Highlighting their importance, Mr Maimu said it would be easy to trace individuals involved in crime and identify people who dodge paying tax in the country.
The cards will be very complicated technologically as they will be designed in the form of smart cards with chips connected to the data base system that stores details of each individual.
He said the exercise of providing IDs would be implemented in stages, starting with workers before moving to other people.
He said the IDs were meant for national security and all people, including foreigners living in Tanzania, would get them. For Tanzanians they will be free while foreigners would be charged to get them.
He said Nida would work with the Immigration department to obtain details of foreigners.When they leave for their countries, the foreigners would have to submit the IDs to Nida, he said.
However, Tanzania nationals under the age of 18 years will not be provided with the national IDs, he explained.Tanzanians who would lose their IDs will have to incur costs in the form of a penalty, he said.
He said under this project local authorities would play a great role in giving details of people in their areas."Local leaders are the ones who know their people, and we look forward to getting proper details from them," he said.
The project was first discussed in parliament in 1972 leading to the passing of the 1972 National Identification and Citizenship Act, followed by the 1986 Registration and Identification of Persons Act.
By then budget constraints and priorities were the main reasons for its failure to take off.
The project has gone through the hands of about 20 ministers at the Ministry of Home Affairs, with no tangible decisions on its implementation.
The tendering process has also entered the courts of law, and this has also been another hitch for the speedy as well as smooth processing of the project.
Apart from the tendering process, there emerged another hitch concerning the technology to be applied.
While consultants hired by the government proposed the use of smart card technology, the World Bank, through its development specialist, was talking of barcode technology.
The World Bank Private Sector Development Specialist, Mr Michael Wong, believed that "lack of a nationwide e-Government infrastructure and a national database would make it difficult to implement the Tanzania National ID project."
According to him, the ID system that the Tanzania government is proposing is "too complex and too technologically sophisticated for Tanzania and has never been successfully implemented or deployed anywhere in Africa or Asia."
However, those supporting the smartcard technology argue that it is a secure tamper-proof multi-purpose identity card and several countries have programmes based on smartcard technology. These include Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Morroco, UAE and Egypt.
They also argue that the per capita cost estimates for the Tanzania National ID programme are in line with and, in many cases, much lower than in other countries.
The Tanzania cabinet, through the then minister for Home Affairs, Mr Joseph Mungai, opted for the smart card technology.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Bernard Lugongo
Quelle/Source: The Citizen Daily, 08.02.2010
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