The Chairperson of the Commission on Administrative Justice, Charles Dulo, has announced that the ombudsman's office is engaging with the Registrar of Persons to decentralise ID and driver's license collection.
Speaking in Nyeri on Tuesday, Dulo claimed that several Kenyans lacked the identification documents required when seeking government services, thereby causing delays as they scrambled to register them last minute.
As such, he revealed that his office, the Ombudsman, was seeking to bring the processed documents closer to the applicants at the sub-county level, as the existing service was often faulty, leaving droves of ID cards and driving licenses uncollected at Huduma Centres months after processing.
“We are engaging the Registrar of Persons to ensure that once the IDs are ready, they are taken to the sub-county level so that the chiefs, who know the people who have applied for the IDs, can deliver them to the applicants," he stated.
"We have been informed that the registration bureau sends the applicants a text, but the system is not entirely effective, so we are going to explore other ways of ensuring that once the IDs and other documents are ready, they are taken closer to the people to get their documents."
He also revealed that CAJ was seeking to collaborate with the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) to resolve the network challenges that have hampered the verification of driving license holders months after applications.
In Mount Kenya alone, the number of uncollected IDs was 25,000, with 6,000 of them consisting of first-time applications by April 2025.
Dulo further revealed that his office was calling for concerted efforts by both the National and County governments to sensitise the public on the importance of the timely acquisition of these documents to ensure that they do not miss out on government services.
“The Registrar of Persons cited late registration as a big challenge," he said.
"These documents are not only vital at the time of voting, but they are equally vital in terms of other services, such as registering for the Social Health Authority, applying for loans from the Higher Education Loans Board, and succession because if you are going to get an inheritance, you will be required to have an ID and that is why we are encouraging people who are above 18 to register for IDs."
This comes just weeks after Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen revealed that the government is in the process of deploying special machines to marginalised communities that will enable the swift registration and processing of ID cards.
Murkomen said that the portable battery-powered 'Mobile Live Capture Unit' machines would electronically capture people's data, which will then be used to register IDs, which would then be processed within three days.
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