People in some districts are having trouble renewing their national Identity Cards (IDs), just weeks after the exercise was devolved to accommodate constituencies.
At Chipala Primary School in Lilongwe’s Area 50 some people said for two days now, they have failed to renew their IDs as there are reportedly no forms at the Centre.
This follows the announcement from the government that they will recruit 200 people to do the excise in district to make the work easier.
Information made available to us indicates that national ID card was designed to last for 10 years , meaning that all the people who got their ID cards during the Mass Registration Exercise in 2017 would have had their ID cards expire in 2027.
NRB spokesperson Norman Fulatira in the past he said government did well to allow for the gradual expiry of national IDs.
He said allowing all national IDs to expire at once would have created a logistical nightmare.
Therefore during the design period of the project NRB and collaborating partners decided to spread the expiry of the cards for 10 years depending on the age of a person while giving a grace period of 3 years.
According to reports all cards that were supposed to expire in 2018, 2019 and 2020 were therefore pushed to expire in 2021.
So in 2021 around 2.9 million ID cards are expiring.
