Nubian Rights Forum & 2 others v Attorney General & 6 others; Child Welfare Society & 9 others (Interested Parties) [2020] eKLR In his view, NIIMS could also help in the elimination of trafficking in children and child labour as well as help enforce laws against child marriage. 465. It was Mr. Muchemi’s opinion that commercial tools may run on open source software primarily because of the commercial conveniences associated with open source software. However, government tools invariably run on closed source software owing to the nature of sensitivity of the information maintained and processed by such tools. Furthermore, systems that run on closed source software have their own security testing mechanisms. That regardless of the adequacy or lack of legislative and policy frameworks, sensitive systems such as NIIMS are architecturally designed to incorporate safeguards that guard the access of data even by authorized personnel to ensure that though they may access the data, they do not do it without accountability and that they can only access it when it is required. In any event, security of data in any digital system is not necessarily entirely dependent on the existence of stringent legislative and regulatory frameworks. 466. Mr. Waikwa, Counsel for the 1st Petitioner cross-examined Mr. Muchemi on his appointments to Boards of various organisations that have a connection with or are under the Ministry of ICT. Mr. Muchemi denied that he is a public officer, and stated that he has consulted for government, the last consultation having been in the SWOT analysis where he was seconded to UNICEF as the lead member for government. He clarified that his only connection with NIIMS was the SWOT report, which was prepared in December 2017 before the establishment of NIIMS, and that he had not conducted any study on NIIMS thereafter. He also testified that he is not involved in the implementation of NIIMS, nor in the setting up of the NIIMS architecture. 467. Mr. Muchemi stood by the averments in his affidavit on NIIMS being a centralized system, on the birth register being a unique identifier, and on probabilistic and deterministic system and deduplication and multi-modal systems, which he stated were reached from his SWOT analysis and his experience. 468. On re-examination by Dr. Nyaundi, and Mr. Njoroge Regeru, Mr. Muchemi clarified that he has professional involvement with corporate bodies and private sector bodies that work in the area of ICT, and that this did not influenced his SWOT analysis. Further, that the focus of the SWOT analysis was to harmonise fragmented citizens’ identity information and that it did allude to a centralised database as a single source of truth on identity, which is NIIMS. 469. Mr. Loyford Muriithi also gave expert evidence on behalf of the 5th Respondent. He deposed that he is an Assistant Director in the Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology and has been involved in all the processes of development and establishment of the NIIMS project. It was his testimony that in designing the operational and functional architecture of NIIMS, the government carefully selected various desirable attributes adopted by various jurisdictions they benchmarked in and customized them to suit the unique circumstances of Kenya. With particular reference to Estonia, he averred that the government consciously resorted to model its identity system from the Estonian one as both Kenya and Estonia keep a digital centralized master population register of all their respective citizens and registered foreign nationals and they have no monopoly over the individual functional data repositories that belong to the institutions linked to the said national master population registers. 470. As such, every institution linked to the national master population register can use the identity data kept in the national master population registers for purposes of authenticating the identity of individuals. However, the national master population registers can neither access nor use the functional data stored in the individual repositories belonging to the institutions linked to the national master population registers in question. 471. It was his deposition further that the departure of NIIMS from the Estonian system is marked by the fact that Estonia utilizes identity cards which are valid for both physical and digital identification and is based on an electronic chip and two pin codes supplied with the card. By using a smart card reader and a computer connected to http://www.kenyalaw.org - Page 69/174