Uganda’s National Identification and Registration Authority is holding about 5.4 million newly printed national identity cards that citizens have yet to collect, exposing a widening service-delivery crisis at the agency responsible for the country’s formal identity system.
The backlog was disclosed to Parliament on Monday as NIRA officials appeared before the Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (COSASE), where lawmakers questioned the authority over delays in issuing identity cards and expanding civil-registration services.
NIRA Executive Director Rosemary Kisembo attributed the delays largely to inadequate permanent staffing following the expiry of a large temporary workforce recruited to support a nationwide mass enrolment and identity-card renewal exercise.
“The authority’s existing workforce is insufficient for the scale of its statutory responsibilities,” Kisembo told the committee. “The workload vis-à-vis the staffing structure does not match.”
NIRA has printed about 15.4 million new national identity cards but issued only around 10 million, leaving approximately 5.4 million cards in its custody.
The backlog has consequences beyond the collection of a plastic card. The national ID is increasingly required to access banking and mobile-money services, obtain driving permits and complete a range of government and civil-registration transactions.
Staff shortfall
NIRA has an approved establishment of 571 positions, but only 418 are currently filled. Of these, just 201 employees are directly involved in serving clients.
The staffing gap has become more acute as NIRA’s responsibilities have expanded.
Under the Registration of Persons Act, 2015, as amended in 2024, the authority is responsible for maintaining the National Identification Register, registering citizens and lawful non-citizens, and handling births and deaths.
The 2024 amendments also transferred civil-registration responsibilities, including marriage registration, from the Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB) to NIRA.
That expanded mandate came without a proportionate increase in the authority’s permanent staffing capacity, according to Kisembo.
The agency estimates that even with temporary workers, it would take about nine months to clear the current stock of uncollected cards if staff concentrated solely on distributing them.
NIRA is seeking to increase its permanent establishment from 571 to 998 positions. It is also requesting at least 2,700 temporary workers for 18 months to support the expanded workload.
The temporary workforce would be expected to help renew identity cards for about six million registered Ugandans, register an estimated 10.9 million people who remain outside the national identification system, process changes of personal particulars and support birth and death registration.
Short-term fix
For the current financial year, NIRA received about Shs15 billion for temporary staffing and recruited between 3,000 and 3,600 workers for three months at approximately Shs40,000 per day.
But Kisembo warned that the arrangement does not provide a lasting solution.
“At the end of three months, we shall go back to the point of 418 staff, of which 201 are client-facing,” she said.
The staffing explanation, however, did not convince all members of COSASE.
George Musisi, the committee’s deputy chairperson and MP for Kira Municipality, said delays could not be explained by staffing numbers alone and pointed to efficiency, motivation and internal service standards.
“It is not just about the numbers of the staff… just picking a card, not registration, picking a card is problematic,” Musisi said, describing his own experience at a NIRA office.
Committee chairperson Muwada Nkunyingi also raised complaints from citizens whose newly issued cards had not been activated or linked to systems needed to access other services.
Geofrey Wokuri, MP for Bungokho County South, highlighted the impact on young people seeking driving permits, saying payments associated with driving training can expire while applicants wait for their identification details to become operational.
NIRA acknowledged that its driving-permit system is still being integrated with the new identification platform but said an interim solution has been put in place.
Marriage records add to burden
The authority is also absorbing a substantial archive of marriage records following the transfer of marriage-registration functions from URSB.
NIRA inherited about 1.2 million physical marriage records stored in roughly 302 archival boxes that had previously been kept off-site under a URSB contract.
Officials told lawmakers that NIRA had procured and migrated a system based on the platform previously used by URSB.
“The system is the same. It was just moved from… URSB because now URSB doesn’t have a marriage function,” officials told the committee.
NIRA now oversees registration of civil, church, customary, Hindu and Muslim marriages.
The agency therefore faces a dual challenge: clearing a huge backlog of identity cards while simultaneously expanding the range of registration services it is expected to deliver.
A wider identity gap
The uncollected cards are only one part of Uganda’s identity-management challenge.
NIRA estimates that about 10.9 million Ugandans remain outside the national identification register, while roughly six million people already registered have yet to renew their identity cards.
That means the authority must simultaneously distribute millions of cards already printed, renew millions more, enrol people who have never entered the system and absorb additional civil-registration responsibilities.
For citizens, the delays can translate into more than administrative inconvenience. Where identity verification is a prerequisite for accessing financial, transport or government services, a system that has printed an ID but cannot efficiently deliver or activate it can leave people formally registered but practically locked out of services.
The parliamentary scrutiny therefore places the focus not only on how many cards NIRA can print, but on whether the institution has the staffing, systems and operational capacity to turn national identification into a functioning public service.
