Editor,

Allow me to react to the article, "Education board, NIDA keep students on their toes over IDs” (The New Times, April 28).

Does NIDA understand that by students registering with wrongly spelt names they will be inadvertently changing their names forever? Their entire official documents from then onwards will have that wrong NIDA given name. They will be saddled with a miss-spelt name simply because NIDA did not want to take the trouble of correcting a mistake of their own making.

NIDA and REB need to get over their defensiveness and help these students.

I quote a paragraph from the article: "REB, yesterday, directed secondary schools head teachers to handle the cases instead of sending them to Kigali.” How exactly will head teachers handle the cases? Do they have the power to rectify IDs? All they can do is force students to accept their ID as is.

And why is NIDA "dismissing the student's fears”? If this is something that has happened before, then students have every reason to be worried.

Concerned Rwandan