'My ID Photo Is Someone Else's Face': Nairobi Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Crisis in Huduma Namba Records

A bodaboda operator from Mathare North says he turned up at a Huduma Centre on Ngong Road last month to renew a document, only to be told the photograph attached to his national ID number belonged to a woman he had never met. He left without a resolution. He has been back three times since.

His case is not isolated. Across Nairobi's densely populated eastside corridors — from Eastleigh Section III to the backstreets of Gikomba Market — residents are filing complaints about duplicate or mismatched photographs embedded in the government's Huduma Namba biometric registry, the centralised identity system that underpins access to everything from mobile credit to civil service employment screening. With the Ruto administration pushing digital public services as a fiscal efficiency measure under its IMF-linked austerity programme, the integrity of that underlying data has never mattered more.

The problem surfaced publicly after the National Registration Bureau began cross-referencing Huduma Namba records against the new Kenya Kwanza digital payments infrastructure in early 2026. Discrepancies flagged during that audit pointed to a pattern: in some cases, a single photograph had been assigned to multiple ID numbers; in others, photographs appeared to have been reassigned entirely during database migration exercises. The bureau has not issued a public statement detailing the scale of the error, and The Daily Nairobi's requests for comment went unanswered by press time.

Blocked Loans, Failed Vetting: The Street-Level Cost

For residents of Kibera's Soweto Estate, where the nearest functioning Huduma Centre is the Likoni Road branch in Industrial Area — a matatu ride that costs between Sh50 and Sh80 depending on traffic — the bureaucratic burden is compounding a deeper financial squeeze. Several people at the Likoni Road branch on a recent Tuesday morning described having their M-Pesa-linked credit scores frozen after KCB's mobile lending arm, KCB M-Pesa, ran identity verification checks that returned photograph mismatches. One woman said she had been waiting six weeks for her case to be escalated internally.

At Eastleigh's Garissa Lodge area, a community paralegal who assists Somali-Kenyan residents with documentation described a particular vulnerability among dual-registered individuals — people who hold both a Kenyan ID and a foreign national certificate. She said the photograph duplication problem disproportionately affects this group because their records were entered into the Huduma system during a compressed 2019 enrolment drive that prioritised speed over verification. The 2019 Huduma Namba enrolment registered roughly 38 million Kenyans before a High Court injunction paused mandatory linkage, according to figures reported at the time by the Communications Authority of Kenya.

The Nairobi Metropolitan Services' ongoing informal settlement upgrading programme in areas like Mukuru kwa Njenga has added another layer of urgency. Residents there must prove identity to access titling processes and infrastructure subsidy applications. A photograph mismatch effectively freezes that eligibility. The Mukuru Special Planning Area project, which covers roughly 640 hectares across three wards, is supposed to be at titling stage by late 2026, meaning the window for affected residents to fix records is narrowing.

What Residents Are Being Told to Do

The Huduma Kenya call centre — reachable at 0800 221 000 — is directing complainants to physically present themselves at a Huduma Centre with the original ID card, a police abstract confirming the discrepancy report, and two passport photographs. Processing time, staff at the Teleposta Towers branch on Kenyatta Avenue told walk-in visitors, is currently running at 21 to 30 working days.

That timeline frustrates people for whom a month without verified identity means a month without formal credit access. Digital rights advocates at the Kenya ICT Action Network, based in Kilimani, are urging affected residents to file simultaneous complaints with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner on Upper Hill's Upperhill Close road, arguing that a photograph duplication constitutes a breach under the Data Protection Act of 2019. The commissioner's office has a dedicated complaints portal at odpc.go.ke and, under the Act, is required to acknowledge complaints within 21 days.

For the bodaboda operator from Mathare North, none of this is fast enough. His fourth visit to the Ngong Road Huduma Centre is scheduled for next week.