THE notice has been posted that individuals who are yet to collect their national identification cards have 30 days to do so at district offices, The National Identification Authority (NIDA) is getting weary on the situation, and had lately moved the cards from village and street or ward offices to district headquarters. The surprising aspect is that if they don’t turn up this will result in the suspension of using national identification numbers (NIN), now the sole element that the public desires.

It is unclear if there is no auxiliary legal empowerment or provision in law as to the use of the number, as different from holding the card itself, as the institution’s CEO was intimating. The idea that those who do not collect the cards would find themselves blocked from use of NIN, the key component of identification for essential public services, Not picking up one’s identity card in law can be called a tort, that is, an ordinary error, whereas freezing the NIN is potentially a breach of individual right.

Contrary to what the CEO stated that the NIN can be withdrawn at will, it isn’t the holder of NIN who would fail to use the number but NIDA would be blocking access to confirmation of that number by public institutions when the need arises. The idea that this blocking of access is punishment for not having picked up the card in which the number is embedded might not be really convincing for this or that public entity. They would resort either to other forms of identification or use earlier access to validate identity for that individual, that the lack of access isn’t their fault.

Explaining the move as intended to address the backlog of uncollected cards is valid only up to a point, as this is substantial to the issuing agency rather than the public, In that context, there is a risk for NIDA to lose its day to day relevance as most of those who need the number for mobile phone registration in particular already have them. They would be satisfied with the identity number they have, and don’t have to carry another card.

Surprisingly, looking at what President Samia Suluhu Hassan has been saying about national identification numbers, the fact that NIDA still has many such cards ought not to pose problems. What the president has been saying is less on the card as NIDA states but more on the numbers which people already hold, and the sort of improvements that the president was suggesting, are better on the numbers than on the cards. In other words, NIDA has an opportunity to build a databank with numbers, where cards will be made available if one really needs them, on request.

At that point all particulars relevant to an individual will have been updated, and even if no person seeks out cards, the agency could still keep an updated stock of information by means of interoperability of government information technology systems, what is known as e-government. When an individual registers anything, say a house, a matrimonial engagement or a bank loan, and there is a setting in which the name will click on systems that are interoperable with NIDA,  or click something like an SMS on the name for NIDA attention, it will silently be updating those national identification numbers without ever issuing new cards.