Illegal IDs were issued to foreigners during Matiang’i tenure, MP Koech claims

Koech, who also chairs the Departmental Committee on Defense, Intelligence and Foreign Relations at the National Assembly, on Monday claimed that the said ID’s were issued during the tenure of former President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2022.

“We went further and looked into the Identification cards they claimed to be illegally acquired. The IDs were issued in the year 2022 when Fred Matiang’i, was the Cabinet Secretary and Uhuru Kenyatta was the President,” said Koech during a panel discussion on Citizen TV’s Day Break. 

Koech, when tasked to comment on the issuance of passports, revealed that the National Intelligence Service is involved in the vetting process of individuals to be assigned passports.

Also, he questioned what the Director of Immigration would do about a decision made in 2022. Koech maintained that as long as one has a Kenyan identification card, they qualify for a passport.

“If the National Intelligence Service, then in 2022, found it proper to issue an ID to these individuals, what would deny the Director of Immigration? What would they use to deny the same person an opportunity to own a passport? There is no reason whatsoever,” said the MP.

Further, the Member of Parliament opined that those breaches occur everywhere in the world, including the most sophisticated systems in the United States and the United Kingdom.

On the same panel, Kajiado North MP Onesmus Ngogoyo argued that the Kenyan passport would soon be degraded. 

“There are many leakages that have crept into the system of issuing the passport and Kenyan ID,” said Ngogoyo

"There is a second layer of vetting that usually happens. There must be a covering letter that goes into a vetted file of an applicant. The lack of this means that someone is not working,” he added. 

A recent expose by the Standard newspaper found that foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds from neighbouring countries, including Somalia, Uganda and Ethiopia, have obtained Kenyan national Identity Cards for as low as Ksh.15,000.

The report revealed how officials within the Immigration Department and the National Registration Bureau allowed individuals to acquire ID’s through bribery and corruption without proper vetting, scrutiny or verification.