Back
when I was in high school, people would have mild doses of craziness as
their final exams rolled around. There would be some cases of
indiscipline that schools would tolerate from their last-year students,
while some others would start going to church, which was now open almost
24 hours a day.
A
few others would become fans of predicting the future, or Nostradamus
and memorize, share or write witty predictions or Bible verses for
empowerment and confidence building.
One
of the then-common revelation verses was about the Mark of the Beast to
mark humans at the end of time. Revelations 13:17 in the Bible reads "and that no man might buy or sell save that he had the mark (or name) of the beast and the number of his name".
What’s
the link? Here in Kenya we have the identity card (ID) system, and the
sequence of numbers on Kenyan ID cards has been the backbone of record
keeping at many government departments, banks, and other institutions.
Without
showing an ID you can’t enter many places, and once inside, you have to
show the same ID and have it recorded or entered into a computer system
to gain service. The same sequence of numbers on your ID is tied to
many other systems and is entered as the primary search detail.
KRA PIN ‘VERIFIABLE’
The
ID is the current "mark" that the government system uses for its
citizens but it is an imperfect one. It is a random sequence of numbers
that change when you get a new-generation ID.
Right
now there’s more than one government plan to come up with another ID
card system in the name of national security and this will likely have
new ID numbers.
The
same flaw applies to passports, which some Kenyans sometimes use to
open bank accounts, but which then have to be changed every few years
when they fill up or expire.
A
better way to sort or index citizen data would be to use a stronger
number that does not change every few years and is accessible to
companies and individuals, both local and foreign. That number already
exists, and it is the PIN number from the Kenya Revenue Authority.
KRA PINs are easy to obtain, and their authenticity can also be verified by checking against records on the KRA site — something that’s not possible with IDs.
SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER
PIN
number data is also dynamic, while ID data is static. Imagine if M-Pesa
and the other mobile transfer companies made the KRA PIN card an
accepted form of ID to transact, and that it became mandatory after a
test period?
You could visualize the data and patterns of cash movement in the country in addition to numerous other sequences.
There’s
some move to make the PIN a primary record document, and KRA now
penalizes some companies for not having PIN numbers of their corporate
and individual clients.
A KRA PIN is like a Social Security number (SSN) in the USA — and that is a country that has no national ID systems but instead has almost 50 states, each issuing its own driver’s license — and the SSN essentially functions as the American national ID.
Most
US documents do bear SSNs that are used to index everything from police
searches to financial and university records to customer databases at
clothing and video rental shops. SSNs do not change even if US citizens
move across state borders, change names, or get married.
PICTURE ID AT AGE 15
In
very rare cases, it is possible to change a SSN if one can prove he or
she hs been a victim of identity theft or domestic violence.
Looking
even further into the revelations of the future, the most advanced
country in terms of ID and e-government is not the USA but tiny Estonia,
which has a population of just 1.3 million people.
There,
it is mandatory to get a picture ID at age 15 that has a chip that
carries data that enables its citizens to sign documents, vote online,
pay for parking or bus tickets and even vote on the Internet, something
that 25 per cent of Estonians did in 2011. Estonians have managed to
create one card that acts as a voting card, a bank card, a beba pay card, a tax card, and even as a passport.
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