An identity should not have an expiry date

There is a peculiar cruelty buried inside a small green or blue card that every adult Mosotho is required to carry. It is not the photograph, which is usually unflattering. It is not the fingerprint panel, which most people never look at twice. It is the date stamped quietly in the corner, the one that tells you that in ten years’ time, the document that proves you exist will cease to prove anything at all.

Your fingerprints will not change. Your iris will not change. The unique biological signature that the state used to certify that you, and no one else, are who you say you are will remain exactly as it was on the day it was captured.

And yet the card will expire, and with it, bureaucratically speaking, so will you. This is the quiet absurdity at the heart of Lesotho’s national identity system, and it is one that successive governments, this one included, have chosen not to confront. The National Identity Cards Act of 2011 fixed the validity of the identity card at ten years.

It was, at the time, presented as a modernising step, a leap from the old, paper-based, easily forged documents of the past into a biometric era where the state would finally know, with certainty, who its citizens were.

That leap was worth taking. What was not worth taking, and what nobody has adequately explained since, is the decision to bolt an expiry date onto a document whose entire justification is that it is built on things that do not expire.

Fingerprints do not need to be renewed. The whorls and ridges that were pressed onto a scanner in Maseru or Mokhotlong in 2014 are, barring injury or disease, the same ones that exist today and will exist in twenty years. The iris, similarly, is understood by every serious identity system in the world to be one of the most stable biometric markers available to science, more stable in many respects than a signature or a photograph, both of which the state is perfectly content to leave unchanged on documents for far
longer than a decade.

If the entire point of biometric identification is that it fixes identity to the body rather than to a piece of paper that can be lost, smudged, or forged, then the logic of expiry collapses. You cannot simultaneously tell a citizen that his fingerprint is the unimpeachable proof of who he is, and then tell him ten years later that the proof has run out.

What has actually run out, in every meaningful sense, is not the citizen’s identity. It is the government’s capacity to manage the renewal process it created for itself.

This is the part of the story that ought to embarrass every minister who has held the Home Affairs portfolio since the system went live.

The National Identity and Civil Registry rolled out its biometric register from 2013 onward with real ambition, and to its credit, it succeeded in bringing millions of Basotho into a modern identity database for the first time.

But a decade is not a long time in government planning, and it arrived faster than the department was ready for. We are now living through the entirely predictable consequence: a mounting backlog of citizens whose ten years are up, queuing at overstretched offices, some travelling long distances from the mountains to district centres only to be told to come back another day, others discovering that their expired card has quietly locked them out of banking services, SIM card registration, school enrolment for their children, or a job interview that required proof of identity on the spot.

There has even been a motion before Parliament asking that the expiry be suspended altogether, a tacit admission from within government itself that the system cannot cope with what it demanded of citizens.

This is what happens when policy is imported without being interrogated. Ten-year expiry windows exist in many identity systems around the world, but those systems typically sit inside wealthy, administratively dense states with thousands of registration points, digital renewal channels, and same-day issuance.

Lesotho has none of that in sufficient measure. We are a small country with a thin administrative footprint, a diaspora of labour migrants working across the border in South Africa who cannot simply pop into a district office on a weekday afternoon, and a rural population for whom a trip to renew a card can mean a full day’s wages lost and a taxi fare the family cannot spare.

To impose the same renewal cycle on this country that a far richer, far more urbanised nation might impose on itself is not modernisation.

It is a failure to design policy for the country we actually have, rather than the country the drafters perhaps wished we were.

And here lies the deeper indictment. This is not a new problem that caught the current administration by surprise. The ten-year clock has been ticking since the Act came into force, which means every government since 2011 has known, or ought to have known, exactly when this crisis would arrive. Ten years is not an ambush.

It is a countdown that anyone in the Ministry of Home Affairs could set a calendar reminder for. Instead, we are treated to the now-familiar spectacle of a Lesotho state agency reacting to a crisis of its own making as though it were an act of God, scrambling for mobile registration units and extended office hours only after the queues have already formed and the anger has already spread on radio call-in shows and in taxi ranks. Where was the decade of preparation?

Where was the investment in decentralised, digital renewal that would have let a citizen confirm their continued identity with a fingerprint scan at a local council office in minutes rather than a full day’s journey?

A government that builds a biometric system sophisticated enough to capture an iris scan but too under-resourced to let that same citizen renew a card without losing a day’s income has misplaced its priorities.

The honest answer is that identity documents should not expire at all, or at the very least should not expire on a timeline this short in a country with these constraints. What should be renewed, periodically and without drama, is the photograph, since faces do age, and perhaps the physical card itself, which can wear out or be damaged. But the underlying certification of identity, the fact that this fingerprint belongs to this person and no other, should stand for as long as the person lives, updated only when circumstances genuinely change, such as a legal name change or a correction of an error in the original record. Countries that take biometric identity seriously increasingly separate the physical card, which can be reissued cheaply and quickly, from the underlying biometric certification, which does not need to be reverified from scratch every decade.

There is no technical reason Lesotho could not do the same. There is only the absence of political will to admit that the current model is not working and to redesign it around the lived reality of the people it is meant to serve.

None of this is an argument against having identity documents, or against biometric technology, which has genuine value in preventing fraud and strengthening the integrity of the civil register.

It is an argument against a government, and a succession of governments before it, treating a poor country’s citizens as though they had the administrative luxury of a wealthy one.

Basotho did not ask to be identified by fingerprint and iris only to be told, a decade later, that their identity has an expiry date the state itself cannot honour. If the biology does not change, the bureaucracy has no excuse.

This OPINION is also published in the latest issue of Maseru Metro.