Election delaying NID process

By MICHAEL PHILIP
MOBILE operations team leader for the National Identification (NID) office in East New Britain, William Kaluai, says the turn-out of people to register is slow because of the General Election 2022.
“The election process really affects our roll-out awareness in the province and the turnout of people,” he said.
“Our targeted areas like local communities are more into election activities.
He said the number of people coming in to register was low.
“We are finding it difficult to at this time to go out to the wards to do awareness and registration.
“Nobody will have that interest to listen or pay attention to us while out there. It’s beyond our control, we’ll let it be.”
Kaluai told The National that the inclusion of Coronavirus (Covid-19) in 2019 had been another major challenge which slowed registration.
He said while slowly picking up to fast track the registration process from where they left in 2020, the election preparation again became another challenge for them.
He added that while the NID office in Kokopo had started to make some progress over the last six months, this had now slowed down because of the elections which had taken everyone’s attention.
“Our focus now is on schools, that is where we have the population.”