The government has onboarded 18000 services through the National e-citizen and together with other immigration functions now collects Sh 400 Billion Immigration Principal Secretary Prof Julius Bitok has said.
Prof Bitok said that there was a huge leap in the cash collection following the government’s deliberate move to put most of its services on the digital platform becoming the first country in the world to have such a number of services online.
Speaking when he took the Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and acting Interior and National Coordination Cabinet Secretary through their services at the Nyayo house, Prof Bitok said that Kenya has had surpassed Rwanda with about 700 services online alongside other countries like India and most of the European countries which had less than 500 such functions digitally.
“From 354 services on e-citizen, we are now doing 18,000 services digitally, the result is that the government collects Sh300 billion from e-citizen alone and another Sh 100 billion on other immigration functions, making it one of the best performers in revenue collection,” said Prof Bitok.
Prof Bitok said the government had identified 20,721 services for onboarding onto the e-Citizen platform out of which 17,692 were on boarded, representing 85 percent of identified services.
“Further, 547 MDAs were identified for onboarding out of which 288 were successfully onboarded representing 52 percent of identified Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs).
Prof Bitok said in the Financial Year 2023/2024, the State Department had issued 539,810 passports, 28,121 work permits, 186,892 Temporary permits, 566,294 visas, and 666,475 Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA).
“We have also given out 1,002 Citizenship certificates, 1,472 Permanent Residence certificates, 824,364 ID cards (2nd generation), and 972,630 Maisha cards (3rd generation). We have also registered 1,168,151(75 percent) births and 204,498 which is 45 percent deaths,” said Prof Bitok.
During the same period, the PS said that 6,996,404 Kenyan Citizens and foreign nationals were cleared at the point of entry, while 145,746 refugees were registered.
The PS said that the state Department was collecting about Sh 900 million to a billion daily from their services from a paltry Sh60 million daily when there were less than 400 services, noting that just a few services had remained before all the government services became cashless.
He noted that they had done away with the several pay bills that were causing confusion and possible leakage of cash and instead had adopted the 222222 pay bill number as their sole mobile payment number.
Mudavadi thanked the officers at the State Department for their dedication and urged them to give Kenyans their best services as a sign of patriotism to their country.
“Your first and last agenda should be to the service of Kenyans,” said Mudavadi.
He noted that through technology, the country was on the right trajectory and urged for the onboarding of the remaining services to ensure that there was no cash interaction between the government officers and Kenyans thus ensuring diminished corruption.
“From what I am seeing, when you reduce the human interaction with cash, you have solved more than half of the problems to do with corruption,” said Mudavadi.
Immigration Director-General Evelyn Cheluget said the department had reduced the production of passports from two to several months in the past, now it took seven days for a Kenyan to get their passports.
“We have also increased the stations including new ones in Bungoma and Kericho where Kenyans can get their passports so that Kenyans don’t have to travel far for their passports. We plan to open three other new stations in Machakos, Nyeri, and Garissa to ensure there are no long lines in the queue,” said Ms Cheluget.
