By Amin Kef Sesay
Director General of the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA), Mohamed Mubashir Massaquoi has assured that the National Identity Cards will be issued to citizens by the end of this year, adding that the procurement process is being completed and that the proposal will be presented to Cabinet and then to Parliament for ratification. He added that the I.D Card will match international standards and will not be counterfeited. “The issuance of cards is going to be decentralized,” he noted.
He was speaking at the budget presentation by Ministries, Departments and Agencies at the Ministry of Finance. The National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) made this submission on Monday 27th September, 2021 presented its FY2022 operational budget to the Risk Assessment Committee at the Ministry of Finance.
In his succinct presentation, the Director General of NCRA, Mohamed Mubashir Massaquoi, said they were at the hearing to give an account of what they did in 2021; their 2020 activities and what they plan to undertake in 2022 and to further state what the Authority needs for its effective operation.
In the midst of the several challenges that the Government has, D.G Massaquoi said he believes the NCRA is a critical priority in the governance and accountability framework of the country, in the sense that they are expected to account for the existence and permanent legal heads of every resident in this country, whether citizens and non-citizens, and as well the agents that characterized their existence such as marriage, divorces, adoptions as well as births and deaths.
D.G Massaquoi said it was necessary for the Government to invest in the country’s civil registration system so as to enable it have an accurate data that can neither be challenged nor questioned. He recalled how past data on Sierra Leone’s population had become subjects of intense questioning or suspicion, while stressing that his Authority was committed to putting together a reliable data .
Massaquoi outlined with clarity the activities they had done so far, stating that they have been able to account for the country’s population data in a precise manner. He also stated that requests for information on the country’s population from International Organizations like the UN and ECOWAS particularly in relation to SDGs have always been satisfactorily complied with.
The Director pleaded with the Ministry of Finance to be magnanimous as the Authority was challenged with the availability of adequate resources to support their interventions. He spoke about the NCRA’s partnership with the Ministry of Finance in working on areas such as the payroll regularization, the biometric verification of chiefdom functionaries, the recent verification of pensioners, and the farmers’ verification and more.
Massaquoi concluded by saying that the Accountant General had recently requested the NCRA to help them with data on the dead—a system by which every dead person is accounted for and get struck off the payroll the moment he or she dies.
