Nubian Rights Forum & 2 others v Attorney General & 6 others; Child Welfare Society & 9 others (Interested Parties) [2020] eKLR data collection was to be done, he had not enrolled for the Huduma Namba, and had no experience on how the data was collected. 101. When asked about his averments regarding the process of procurement for NIIMS, Mr. Shafi indicated that he was not familiar with the procurement processes but was aware of the Procurement Act. He conceded further that procurement was not raised as an issue in the 1st Petitioner’s petition but asserted that they searched for information on the procurement for NIIMS on the government domain. He insisted that the information for the Huduma Namba was collected by IDEMIA, and that this was the same company which was contracted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission during the elections. 102. When shown an averment by Jerome Ochieng on behalf of the 5th Respondent that no private entity, including IDEMIA, was used to develop the software for NIIMS, he stated that he did not remember if he had specifically responded to that particular statement. When confronted with the averment by the said deponent that benchmarking trips were made to countries with similar systems, he could not defend his allegation that the Respondents failed to compare the system with other systems such as Aadhaar in India. 103. When shown a copy of the letter he wrote dated 8th April 2017 referenced “Appreciation Letter” and addressed to the 4th Respondent, he asserted that the letter did not reflect the sentiments of the Nubian community about the issuance of identity cards. 104. On re-examination, Mr. Shafi stated that he wrote the letter dated 8th April 2017 to appreciate a good deed, as there is normally a problem between civil society and government. Further, that he had written the letter on behalf of the 1st Petitioner which was partnering with the Registrar of Persons and mobilizing the residents in the issuance of identity cards and birth certificates. He stated that his only problem with the vetting process was that it is only specific communities that are vetted. 105. Mr. Shafi named the members of the vetting committee as the Registrar of Persons, Registrar of Births and Deaths, a District Commissioner or District Officer, an intelligence officer, a senior police officer, an officer from the Directorate of Criminal Investigation, and one Nubian elder. That other than the one Nubian member, the rest of the members are government officials. 106. Mr. Shafi clarified that his grievance with NIIMS and Huduma Namba was that members of the Nubian community would be left out of the exercise. He urged that the issues of discrimination should first be addressed, so that Nubians can walk together with other Kenyans in the NIIMS project. 107. Ms. Fatuma Abdulrahman, who identified herself as a member of the Nubian community, testified as PW5. In her affidavit sworn on 12th April 2019, she gave a background to the challenges facing the Nubian community. She stated that there was no significant discrimination against the community prior to 1990, and they accessed identity documents like other Kenyans. From the 1990’s, however, they started facing severe challenges in accessing documentation and were subjected to differential treatment in terms of access to birth certificates, national identity cards, and passports. They also started experiencing delays in the issuance of documentations and rejection of documentation without any justifiable reasons. In her view, these challenges coincided with their aggressive quest for the Kibra land in Nairobi, and the new generation of Nubians started being branded non-Kenyans. Her opinion was that this was a strategy of disinheriting their children from the Kibra land. 108. Ms. Abdulrahman testified that the differential treatment further worsened after the 7th August 1998 bomb attack and subsequent terrorist attacks in Kenya. She stated that at this juncture, some minority groups like the Nubian community were profiled as a security threat, and had to undergo extra scrutiny or vetting to prove that they are Kenyans. She asserted that the security vetting intensified after its legalisation in the Security Laws Amendments Act 2014. http://www.kenyalaw.org - Page 17/174