03 Jul 2018

Ministry of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs has expressed concern about illegal use of names by some people.

Assistant director for Field Services, North under the department of Civil Registration and National Registration, Ms Ofentse Gojamang said they had realised that many people did change their names and surnames when they grew up. This, she said was common in school going children.

Briefing Ngamiland district councillors about the current status of her department, she said they had observed that illegal changing of names posed a challenge when children had to go for tertiary education, as the names in the school certificates differed with those on national identity cards.

Ms Gojamang appreciated that there was a procedure on change of names especially in marriages and encouraged communities to follow the right procedures.

Ms Gojamang also complained about the high number of unreported deaths, unreturned identity cards of deceased persons, expired cards and people without Omang cards in the region.

Surprisingly, she said the affected persons had not renewed the cards despite their importance in life. In the Ngamiland region, she stated that about 28 238 cards expired this year, while 11 341 were due in Okavango sub district and out of that number, 7 815 had already expired.

She said during their recent field visits to some villages in the Okavango district, they found that some families were still in possession of identity cards of deceased persons and their deaths were not reported.

“We selected villages randomly and found that 19 persons had long died and their families were still in possession of the identity cards,” she said.

In addition, she revealed that some people lacked knowledge as they wanted to know if they would be compensated for returning the identity cards.

She appealed to district leaders to join hands with the department to spread the message about the importance of reporting deaths and surrendering the deceased people’s cards.

Ms Gojamang noted that it was an offence to find someone in possession of another person’s identity card for whatever reasons.

She also appreciated that her department was tasked with a mammoth task to eradicate backlog of expired Omang cards, noting that they had put up some strategies in place to fast track the exercise. Some of the strategies deployed, included setting up of two teams, beefing up of fleet and personnel, ongoing field visits and procurement of critical equipment such as cameras.

Lastly, the assistant director talked about the amended Acts and solicited the councillors’ support to educate other communities about them.

For their part, some councillors called on the department to revisit the fines charged parents who provided inaccurate information noting that might be a hindrance for people to renew their cards. ENDS