Over 300,000 national identification cards, known as idangamuntu are lying in the offices of the the National Identification project, after local authorities failed to find their owners.

According to Marguerite Harelimana, the Head of Public Awareness for the National Identification Project, 311,909 identity cards were returned to their offices. 

"We first sent IDs to different sectors for distribution but some of them were returned after no one collected them,” she said.

"We blame it on the negligence of the owners because we made several announcements asking the owners to pick their IDs but in vain.”

Most of the IDs belong to people who applied for them far from their work or study places, and could not go back to collect them. These are mainly students, soldiers and policemen.

Clement Gasore, the Executive Secretary of Rwabicuma Sector in Nyanza District, said that in his area there are some citizens who do not know the importance of owning IDs.

5,488,459 IDs have been printed out since 2008, when the exercise began,

Among the cards returned are those that were confiscated after realising that they belonged to non Rwandans who had registered illegally.

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