In an effort to curb age fraud among citizens of Uganda, the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) has asked the government to provide 2 billion shillings to buy an age detection machine in order to limit mismatches of people’s age.
According to NIRA, without a clear way of proving that some people might be lying about their ages the agency was worried that a number of citizens provide wrong information about their age while registering for a national ID and in some cases revert to the agency requesting age alterations.
With the age detection machine, NIRA is convinced that it will be able to determine the ages of people and discontinue the ongoing cases of age fraud.
Olive Najjuma,The Fatboy Show host, in a comment on the subject noted that although it is important to stop this age fraud in National Identification and Registration, she queried whether it is an issue of national importance that the government should spend on 2 billion shillings.
Still, she questioned whether the machine would provide the exact estimations of ages given that some people may look older because of their weight or circumstances.
James Onen,commonly known as Fatboy, argued that although the machine might not provide the right ages of people, it may provide a close estimation of a person’s age.
“Instead of buying this 2 billion machine, why doesn’t NIRA focus on training its staff to make sure that they don’t make mistakes on people’s national IDs because yes, a few people will lie about their age but most of the errors on these IDs are done by their human resources,” said Olive.
Relating to the argument, Fatboy said that his National Identification Number (NIN) had been mistaken and that the number started with a CF for females instead of a CM for males. He feared that at the time the car details were transferred to the passport, he would be disqualified to enter into other countries as the mistake would be taken for forgery.
Olive too mentioned that her middle name, Monica, was eliminated on the national ID.She says that she has to explain herself when attaching similar documents with it. She also complained that her birth date was altered from 7th June to 1st June and all this was mistakenly done by the NIRA staff.
The Fatboy show is hosted by James Onen aka Fatboy, Olive and Sarah every weekday from 6am to 10am on RX Radio.