Are there enough Huduma Namba registration centres?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

14 April 2019

A few people have asked me if it possible to registered 35 million Kenyan residents within the 45-day Huduma Namba mass registration period. The answer is: I don’t know and I am not able to calculate it.

The reason is that information about Huduma Namba registration is scarce. I have not seen or heard any official government announcement in the press or on posters on how and where to register. I have checked the web sites of the Ministry of Interior and the Department of Registration of Persons and found nothing about it.

So, I don’t know how many registration centres have been rolled out or where they are located. My conclusion is that this is a very good case study on how not to implement a change programme!

Nevertheless, I may be allowed to turn around the original question in this way: if you wanted to register 35 million people in 45 days, how many registration points would you require?

I have heard from those who have registered that the process is taking about half an hour per person. The centres are opening at 7am and closing at 5pm – that is, 10 hours of operation per day.

Therefore, one centre can only register only 20 people in a day. That is, 900 persons in 45 days.

To find out how many centres are required, we simply divide 35 million by 900. The answer is 38,889. Are those too many?

Not really. In readiness for the 2017 elections, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, IEBC, opened 24,559 voter registration centres all over the country. Their target was to capture about 20 million adult Kenyans. Thus 39,889 is not too large for a target of 35 million.

Perhaps, if we extrapolate using the IEBC figure, we might get a better estimate. Thus, we ask the question: if IEBC used 25,000 centres to capture 20M people, how many would be required to register 35M?

We start by dividing 20M by 25,000 to get the number of people registered per centre. The answer is 800. Then we divide 35M by 800 to get the number of centres. The result is 43,750 centres.

The question then, is: are there about 40,000 centres in the Huduma Numba registration project? Like I said earlier, I don’t know. But I don’t think so.

I say this because I have only seen one – at Nyayo House, Nairobi (the head quarters of registration of persons!). The 24,559 IEBC centres were very visible. Every turn you took there was a team of registration clerks under an umbrella.

This is not the case with Huduma Namba. In my area, we are having to chase the registration centre all over. There seems to be just one kit for the entire sub county! This is simply not enough.

I have now started to suspect that some one is sabotaging the process. The question of who and to what end is far beyond the scope of this column.