SIMcardgate shows Uganda would come second in a one-country race

SIM card registration exercise

Last year, Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency announced plans to send a man into space by 2030. The howls of derision that followed the announcement could be heard from Jupiter.
Some of the dismissals were, no doubt, fuelled by ignorance after all the agency has launched five satellites since 2003, including one designed by its own engineers; three are still in orbit, analysing climate change data, and providing other forms of intelligence.
Still, I would be taken screaming and wailing to the queue of volunteers for Nigeria’s first manned space flight. I am yet to be convinced that a country that can’t manage basic tasks can muster the precision and imagination required for manned space flight. Even if the technology works there is the risk of the chief guest arriving late, or the speeches and traditional dancers going on for so long, you miss your orbit trajectory and end up being catapulted into the general direction of the sun.
Societies achieve increasingly complex tasks by building on the competent execution of smaller, easier tasks. You plan the layout of cities, so you know who lives where, then can deliver the mail, and run buses and trains on time. It is incremental progress; it is competent execution.
Which brings us home to the question: How do you get fifteen or so million people, who are going on with their daily lives and whose mobile phones are working just fine, to go out and re-register their numbers with their national identity cards?
This, in ordinary countries, is a relatively easy question of logic and logistics.
You find and give the people a good reason to go out and repeat the exercise, and show them why it is in their best interest to do so. (Panicking after the assassination of a senior police officer is just not good enough, I’m afraid.)
Then you simulate the process: how long will it take for each re-registration? How many people do you need to hire? What is the longest people will wait before they walk away? How can they do it conveniently, say as they transact on their mobile phones? What back-end infrastructure do you need to ensure that the data are instantly captured, databases interrogated to ensure accuracy, and one-off confirmation sent back, or help offered to those facing challenges?
And then, to overcome the human instinct to procrastinate, how do you give incentives for early re-registration, and penalise later registrants, without having to switch off millions of users and kick an economy already on its knees in its vitals? And – if switching off those who fail to comply is the penalty – how do you enforce it irrespective of the howls of protest or political inconvenience?
But Uganda is not an ordinary country. We are special. Why have a boring, slightly bureaucratic re-registration exercise when we can have a full national drama of pulling teeth? The short answer is that, by and large, we do not apply the critical thinking necessary to simulate outcomes and anticipate unintended consequences, then manage them or redesign programmes. It is hard to generate and manage databases, reformat a subsistence and import-based economy into one that is commercial and export-led if, for instance, you can’t manage the boda boda on the streets. Incremental progress. Competent execution.
Most ordinary folks I know are honest. They have no problem registering their phone numbers to their identities – they have done it before, after all, and expect that so has everyone else. How then is it possible that, in the aftermath of the recent crime wave, it was discovered that some people had unregistered SIM cards?
How is a passport not a ‘valid’ form of identification while a national ID is, when you use a passport as proof of identity in order to get a national ID? And why does one require an LC1 letter in order to get a passport when, strictly speaking, there are no LCs?
And if the National Identification Number is to be our lifelong identifier, why give access to such vital data to private entities such as telecoms without clear safeguards for privacy? And if non-Ugandans already have Ugandan national IDs what, really, are we protecting? Barn door, you forgot to say bye to the horse!
Only time will tell if the SIM card re-registration, and the mass surveillance it is designed to facilitate, will help reduce crime, even as a by-the-way. But if the conduct of the exercise is any indicator of competence, we would come second in a one-country race.

Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki