The National Identification Authority in Tanzania is deleting expiry dates from all National Identity Cards.
Previously the famous and infamous NIDA cards used to be valid for only ten years after their respective dates of issuance.
Local Government Minister, Hamad Mashauri confirms here that, the National ID Cards no longer need to be renewed after every ten years.
Many such cards started rolling out to ordinary residents in 2013, which means those who got the first batch of the plastic cards would have been required to renew them this year 2023.
The first person to be served with the inaugural National ID was the then President of Tanzania, Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete.
Majority of card holders are those who applied for them between 2016 and 2017 when the demand surged.
From then, the National Identification Authority got overwhelmed by the high number of applicants such that NIDA could no longer be capable of printing physical identities.
Instead, people would report to either NIDA headquarters, its regional branches or at local authority offices to only get the serial numbers for their identifications.
At one time the Tanzania National Identification Authority attempted to upload the cards online so that each person could download and print their own but later on scrapped the idea and warned people not to print the same.
As the result, many Tanzanians only have identity numbers but not the physical and tangible National Identity Cards.
Tanzania was also contemplating to upgrade the National IDs to machine readable documents but until now nobody knows what happened to the ambitious project.
The National IDs are used in the country for official transactions, opening bank accounts, applying for driving licenses and passports as well as filling tax returns.
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