Sunday October 18, 2020
By Linda Shiundu
Kenyans who were wrongly registered at the Dadaab refugee camp in order to benefit from basic amenities like food will be deregistered after the government completed its vetting exercise.
The government began the vetting process in Garissa county in November 2019 to determine who was a Somali asylum seeker and who was a Kenyan citizen.
A report by NTV showed almost 14,000 people who were vetted will soon be removed from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) database.
"Today I came with these two important people. One of them is from the head of issues to do with refugees who will take our children out of the camps," said Interior CAS Hussein Dhadho
"And the other one from registration will finally identify them as Kenyans," he added.
This will enable Kenyans who had been denied opportunities and citizenship rights including freedom of movement to acquire Kenyan Identification (ID) Cards.
Area leaders said the move to vet the refugees had been long overdue.
The vetting exercise followed the plight of young Kenyans living in North Eastern whose parents had registered themselves and their children as refugees back in the 1990s.
However, what they did not know was that once their fingerprints were in the UN refugees database and were identified as refugees, they would carry that mark for life.
The most affected were minors who had not acquired their IDs and could not secure formal employment or set up businesses in order to lead a normal life.
Victims had been struggling to shed their refugees' tag as they had been denied opportunities.