State wants Huduma Namba ruling quashed
Attorney General Paul Kihara Kariuki. Government wants Court of Appeal to set aside a High Court ruling that invalidated the roll-out of the Sh10.6 billion Huduma Namba cards.
The government has lodged an appeal against a High Court ruling that invalidated the roll-out of the Huduma Namba cards.
Attorney-General Paul Kihara Kariuki wants the Court of Appeal to set aside the ruling by Justice Jairus Ngaah on October 14, 2021 and substitute it with a finding that the Sh10.6 billion special identification program was properly implemented.
The AG says the High Court judge erred in invalidating the roll-out without appreciating that the court had in another case allowed the government to proceed with implementation of the same project known as National Integrated Identity Management System (Niims) and to process and use the data collected on specified conditions.
He has faulted the judge for finding that the data for Huduma Namba was supposed to be processed according to provisions of the Data Protection Act.
“The judge erred in law and in fact by completely ignoring uncontroverted evidence that Niims was rolled out sometime in March 2019 and that mass collection of personal data had already been completed by the time the Data Protection Act, 2019 came into effect on November 25, 2019,” says the AG. Interestingly, the legality of the Act is subject to another case that is ongoing in court since it is among laws passed by the National Assembly without input of the Senate.
In the judgment of Justice Ngaah, the court found that government’s roll-out of the Huduma cards was unconstitutional on grounds that no data protection safeguards were implemented by the Interior ministry.
Justice Ngaah, however, gave the ministry an opportunity to regularise the process by ordering that an impact assessment be done in relation to data collected from over 36 million Kenyans, many of whom had already collected their cards.
The judge held that even though the Data Protection Act came into place before plans to roll-out the Huduma Cards were launched; the Act should have been enacted retrospectively. This means that the Interior ministry should have complied with the Act once it came into force.
But AG Kihara says the Act was incapable of being given a retrospective application.
