Man fined for possessing two Malawi national IDs
The first grade magistrate court in Mchinji has fined Moffat Charles Msuza, 36, K100 000fine for being found in possession of two Malawian national identity cards bearing similar details.
The court heard that Msuza, who also has a Mozambican national ID, registered twice from different registration centres.
He told the court that he registered at Tamanimwenda Village in Mchinji and Chiwudzu in Lilongwe during the mass registration exercise conducted by National Registration Bureau (NRB).
The State, through the Station Prosecutions Officer, Davie Kusamale, told the court that Msuza was arrested on July 3, 2018 by police officers from Namizana Border Patrol Post when he wanted to get to Mozambique.
When he was interrogated by the police, Msuza claimed that he was coming from Ngongani Village in the area of Traditional Authority Mavwere in Mchinji, where he usually does his business .
The prosecutor said in the course of investigations he was found with three national identity cards: one for Mozambique and two for Malawi but bearing similar details but he did not disclose his motive.
In court, Msuza pleaded guilty to the charge before First Grade Magistrate, Arthur Mtalimanja who found him guilty of being found in possession of two national Identity Cards contrary to section 42 (h) of National Registration Act of 2010.
Mtalimanja ordered Msuza to pay K100,000.00 fine or in default serve 12 months Imprisonment with Hard Labour(IHL).
Msuza comes from Chiwudzu village in the area of Traditional Authority Kalolo in Lilongwe.
Meanwhile. the IDs have been handed over to National Registration Bureau.
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The punishment does not fit the crime. A national ID like that can be worth up to millions of kwachas. How does a $150 fine deter people who can easily fetch $1000 from selling the ID?
It could have been great if the article quoted the authorities comment on this, how it came to happen and what they are doing to stop it happening again.
How could it be some one having two ID with same information ? It shows that this IDs are not computerised anyone may manipulate it
Malawians should be very worried about voter registration tally. Bogus citizens are going to vote and so will duplicates. I am already informed that a number of burundians and Nigerians have multiple Malawi IDs. Don’t ask me how they got them. I wouldn’t be surprised if we are told by Statistics Office that Malawi has a population of 20 million.
Why don’t you use fingerprints when processing IDs by doing so you won’t have any problem.By using a fingerprint you will easily find out who has been issued an ID already.
They already use finger prints. This guys has two copies of the same ID from what the report is saying
One thing about Malawian reporters is ignorance of their profession. Did you ask National Registration Bureau on how possible that one can register more than once and not being detected
komadi eti..
What is at stake is not why this happened but how it happened. The system should be foolproof by rejecting multiple registration by one person.
Should we conclude that this system is fake?
Dont trust these IDs, the system was not able to detect duplicates even at registration centre, let alone at the head office. This is an opportunity to know that we have a porous system which doesn’t have a unique key in the database. How on earth one can register twice having taken his 10 fingerprints. That is just a tip on Iceberg. How would you trust these IDs for voting. We will be voting twice or more. The system that was used to capture data for registration was a clap. you will be surprised that your ID is having someone’s… Read more »
Very high probability of this happening indeed.
How on earth is the system able to accept two registrations by one person? What’s the use of the finger prints we provided? Isn’t that enough biometric information to detect people who want to register twice? So in other words, the finger prints are not working in your Database? Scary! So scary!
I think maybe because data was being capture offline
A good system will detect duplicates regardless of the environment. If data was captured online, when uploading into the main database, duplicates were supposed to be detected during this time. What it means here fingerprints were not used as unique. And its really interesting that we may have IDs that do not contain our fingerprints. One major important event that has been left out is the verification of these IDs by the holders. This is typical of government systems where duplicates are the order of the day, from HRMIS,PENSIONS,ROAD TRAFFIC, IFMIS ETC. The main problem with GOVT systems is that… Read more »