Why vetting Kenyan Somalis for identity cards is discriminatory

Most Kenyans do not know the challenges the Somali community in Kenya faces in obtaining identity documents such as ID cards and passports. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Nairobi, Mandera or Kisumu.

Nor does it matter whether you are born in North Eastern counties, Nairobi or any other county. If you are Somali by tribe, you are subjected to a discriminatory vetting process. I will cite my experiences. 

In 2018, I went to Langata administration offices to change a simple error on my ID card. The administration team at the office knew me. But to comply with the vetting requirements, I was asked to get a copy of the Kenya Gazette in which my election as Mandera County Senator was published. I served as MP and Senator but still, the profiling was applied to me simply because my home county is Mandera. 

When my daughter finished her Form 4 a few years back in a Nairobi school, the immigration team that visited the school to give students ID application forms declined to give her because she was Somali. Instead, she was asked to visit ID registration centres because she is subject to vetting. She was born in Nairobi and had not been to Mandera. Similarly, when my son applied for passports for his children three years ago, his application was sent to Mandera for vetting by the NSIS. Never mind that both he and his children were born in Nairobi. 

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When you apply for an ID in North Eastern, your application goes through strict vetting by a security committee that includes NSIS, Chief, Police, elders etc. After the application is approved, the forms are submitted to Nairobi for processing, and further vetting is done in Nyayo House. Thousands of applications get rejected at this stage simply due to profiling. 

When we presented a complaint against this odious policy to former President Kibaki in 2005, he asked the immigration team in our presence just how it vetted applications in Nairobi for people they do not know about, and who have already been vetted by the local team in the regions. Their answer as you would expect was simple – national security! The usual excuse for harassing Somalis since independence.

But he warned them that this was nonsense and should stop. But it didn’t it. We had told Kibaki this exercise was enforced, at the district and Nairobi levels, to extort money from the applicants. 

In 2003, the then Cabinet Minister for National Security tasked the head of NIS to investigate me and a Senior State Counsel whether we are Kenyans. I was Shadow Finance Minister then, and the SC was chair of the anti-corruption watchdog. We were critical of corruption in his office. Even after NIS cleared us after tracing our roots to our villages, the minister was sceptical and directed one of his cousins in NIS to repeat the exercise! 

The Somali vetting is not similar to the vetting of applicants in other border areas as explained above. This is a deliberate State policy to discriminate and profile Somalis from independence because of the Shifta war on cessation.

In 1990, the infamous screen card was introduced for Somalis to enhance the profiling. Over decades, it evolved as a collective punishment and a corruption network. Thousands of residents in the region do not have ID cards. Students lose out on college and jobs often from lack of this identity document. Residents have been subjected to massive human rights abuses for lack of ID cards. 

There are several studies done by various human rights groups on this matter. I recommend a report by Kenya Human Rights Commission titled ‘Foreigners at Home: The Dilemma of Citizenship in Northern Kenya’ published in 2008. Under the current constitutional dispensation, vetting is discriminatory and unlawful. It must end.

-The writer is former Mandera Senator