Basil to table NID funds report

MINISTER for National Planning and Monitoring Sam Basil will table, in Parliament, a report on how funds allocated to the Civil Registry since 2015 to conduct the national identification (NID) card registration was used.
Basil said the Government had allocated K231 million for the exercise and so far, 21 districts had signed agreements with the Civil Registry office.
The Government allocated another K30mil in 2016, K13mil in 2017, K20mil in 2018 and K15mil in 2019.
“We expect K20mil in 2020 and I will present a detailed report to Parliament on how the funds were used,” Basil said.
He said about 1.4 million citizens were registered last year.
Another two million are expected to be registered this year.
There are 600,000 names in the system waiting to be formalised due to the transition to the digitalised systems, with 300,000 waiting to collect their NID cards.
“For Morobe, about 100,000 are still waiting to be uploaded because in the previous manual system, we managed to print 1,000 cards per day. But with the new system, we can print 16,000 cards a day.”
The Government wants to see all citizens have NID cards to access services.
Basil urged all provincial governors and the 89 MPs to sign the memorandum of understanding with the Civil Registry office to help in registering people so they can have access to services.