Inside plan to issue IDs to secondary school students

National Registration Bureau workers sort out second generation and third generation Maisha identity cards at Huduma Centre in Kakamega on December 21, 2023. [File, Standard] Secondary school students who have attained the age of 18 will be issued with national identity cards and registered as voters while still in school. This is if a Bill before the National Assembly sails through. The Registration of Persons (Amendment) Bill, 2024, seeks to amend Section 107 of the Registration of Persons Act to allow for the registration of eligible students in secondary schools. The Bill sponsored by Suba South MP Caroli Omondi proposes that the principal registrar conducts a national registration exercise for secondary school students every year, with the deadline for the undertaking being the last day of August. "The principal registrar shall by the last day of the month of August each year, conduct a national registration programme to register all secondary school students eligible for registration as of the close of the programme," reads the Bill in part. The registrar will then be required to collect all the necessary details from eligible students between September and December each year to complete the registration process. "The principal registrar shall collect the particulars required under section 5 (1) from all secondary school students eligible for registration between the date after the close of the programme and the last day of the month of December each year for the purpose of registration," adds the Bill. Under the proposed law, students who qualify for registration and issuance of the identity cards will not be charged and will have the IDs delivered to their schools or a designated location if they have already graduated. "The principal registrar shall cause an identity card to be issued under the national registration programme to be delivered for collection free of charge," it further reads. Notably, the Bill currently under review by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), which is tasked with assessing the cost implications and further comparing the proposal with practices in other jurisdictions. Once complete, PBO's findings will be presented to the National Assembly's Budget and Appropriations Committee, where MP Omondi the sponsor -will be required to make a case for the proposed law before it proceeds to its first reading and subsequent public participation before its second reading and either approval or rejection by the House. Should the Bill be passed, it will play a significant role in increasing the number of registered voters by approximately 1 million each year. This, informed by the fact that this year alone, 965,000 students sat for the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exams. Further the Bill is aimed at simplifying the ID acquisition process for the hundreds of thousands transitioning from secondary school to universities and where the identification card is a necessity for placement with the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) and the Higher Education Loans Board (Helb). Ideally, the passage of the Bill will simplify the work of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) which has long struggled with the registration of youth as new voters. According to the IEBC data, only 2.5 million youth were registered as new voters out of a targeted six million. And despite the commission revising its target to 4.5 million, it still fell short. This, the commission noted, was due to increased youth voter apathy where the young adults - that make up approximately 75 percent of the country's 47.6 million population- is reluctant to register as voters. Implementation of the proposed law would also work in aiding the efforts of the IEBC which had earlier this year expressed concerns of not being able to conduct the continuous voter registration exercise thanks to a Sh870.5 million budget cut by the Kenya Kwanza administration. While appearing before the National Assembly's Justice and Legal Affairs committee in July, the commission noted that the budget cut would impact on its ability to maintain the Kenya Integrated Election Management Kits (Kiems Kits) and licences which are critical for registering voters and conducting by-elections.

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