If you apply for a national identity card today, your application will find a backlog of over half a million applications that are yet to be processed.

This is according to an investigative feature that has been released by Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation. According to the newspaper, the National IDs backlog currently stands at more than 600,000.

Shockingly, this backlog is experiencing new applications to the tune of 10,000 every day.

“Applications for new identity cards have piled up to more than 600,000 in the past two-and-a-half months, with the number going up by 10,000 every day,” the newspaper reported on Tuesday.

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The newspaper reported that things have gotten so bad in the processing of national identity cards that critical government institutions that hire Kenyans with a mandatory requirement for national identity card have put their hiring schedules on halt.

“The ID crisis has stopped the Police, National Intelligence Service, Kenya Defence Forces and all other state institutions that employ new staff on a continuous basis from recruiting,” the newspaper reported.

“About 200,000 Kenyans apply for IDs per month, meaning the number of pending applications could hit 1 million by end of next month, if the legal impasse is not resolved.”

The mega backlog has been blamed on a court order that stopped the printing of third-generation identify cards and the switching off of the printers that produced second-generation identity cards.

“Security printer machines that produced the second-generation national cards (IDs) for nearly one-and- a-half-decades were switched off on November 14, 2023, but a court order stopping the printing of third-generation IDs was issued shortly thereafter, halting a process that has routinely as- signed legal identity to Kenyans since 1915,” the newspaper reported.

The huge backlog in the application of national identity cards comes in the wake of another mega backlog in the application of passports that has proved impossible to solve for the Interior Ministry.