By Ilyasa Baa
Approximately about one thousand people suspected to be non-Sierra Leoneans are said to have been apprehended in the United States of America (USA) pending investigation into their country of origin after being caught with over 1000 Sierra Leonean birth certificates.
US authorities, according to the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) in Freetown, are supposed to handle the body of proof to ascertain whether they are from Sierra Leone or just fraudsters pretending to be citizens of Sierra Leone.
Acting Director of Births and Deaths, Brima Victor Kamara, said the Authority has put in place stringent measures in terms of giving out birth certificates. He defended that business is not as usual, noting that now people have to go in person to obtain birth certificates; it is not like before when people were acquiring it in absentia, he maintained.
According to him, the challenge they get is from those that go for birth certificates claiming that they were there for the first time to exercise their right. He said the only way these people can be tracked is when they get to the NCRA for replacement without supporting documents. He added that the Authority is trying to insert some security features on the birth certificates, noting that they are also working assiduously to transform from paper base to data base with some securitized features to prevent identity fraud and enable easy verification by the Authority.
It could be recalled that, because of the good work done by NCRA, during the national payroll verification exercise, which addressed the issue of ghost workers, government has made it clear that any one government employs in the civil service has to be verified by the NCRA before being employed.
In Sierra Leone, the process to penalize birth certificate fraudsters is slow but, with the support of UNICEF, serialized and securitized birth certificates have been printed but not yet issued due to some pending arrangements by the Authority. The Act makes provision for the Director-General of NCRA to withdraw a birth certificate from anyone viewed as necessary.
It is free of cost for just newly born children; the onus lies with the parents to register them at the hospital. Most of the people parading for birth certificates are those that seek jobs or want to travel, seeing the need to reduce or increase their ages for their own benefit.
It is believed that a good number of foreigners obtained Sierra Leonean birth certificates easily with the cooperation of corrupt staff. However, the government of Sierra Leone made some reforms and capacitated the NCRA, but the authority has not begun giving bio-metric identification cards despite the assurances that citizens would get them.