People may be excluded from the Ndaga Muntu system for a variety of reasons. First, there is a general gap in coverage. Since a missing portion of the population has yet to complete the registration process, it is difficult to put an exact number on how many people remain unregistered. NIRA registered 29.34 million people in 2020, 25 million of whom had been successfully registered in the NIR (meaning that their biographic and biometric information, as well as their citizenship status has been established to NIRA’s satisfaction); this included children and young adults below the age of 18. Compared to a total population projected to reach 41.58 million in 2020.174 A 2019 Makerere University survey found that only 94.1% of the population surveyed had already registered for a NIN and an NIC, but that number seems slightly inaccurate based on official statistics released by NIRA.175 There are many reasons for this registration gap: whole villages appear to have been missed; prisoners were unable to register; or during registration drives people were traveling outside of Uganda, in the hospital or were ill or disabled. These and many other individual reasons affect the accuracy of the numbers. As demonstrated in Section 2 of this report, since registration is now rarely offered at parish levels, it has become even more difficult to register with NIRA services, because their offices are only available at the district level. One MP spoke of the issue on the floor of Parliament on 25 February 2020, and said: Getting a national ID in Uganda is as difficult as the NRM bush war of 1986. In Uganda, it is easier to get a passport than a national ID. People come and queue everyday, spend sleepless nights, and they end up not getting IDs. Without a national ID in Uganda, you cannot own a sim card, you cannot access a passport, you cannot get jobs or open a bank account and yet, getting a national ID is a nightmare.176 Second, based on the government’s own data and other official sources, the reliability of which we cannot guarantee, we have calculated that anywhere between 23% and 33% of Uganda’s adult population has not yet received a National Identity Card (NIC). We have attempted to obtain up-to-date data from the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA), but we unfortunately did not receive a reply from NIRA before publication of this report. An Audit of NIRA’s accounts by the Office of the Auditor General in 2019 likely contains the most independent figures and stated that only 12.7 million cards had been ‘issued’,177 as of 2019.178 Based on an adult population of about 18.9 people in 2019, using national population projections by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS),179 this means that only 67% of the adult population had an NIC in 2019 and 33% were therefore excluded. The Minister of Internal Affairs released figures that claimed that NIRA had printed only 18.32 million cards as of March 2020, and of those, only 15.23 million had actually been issued.180 Assuming an adult population that UBOS projected to reach 19.7 million in 2020,181 this results in an exclusion rate of at least 23%.182 Not only are these exclusion percentages dramatically high for a national ID that is now mandatory to access many public and private services, the percentage of the population that is excluded may even be rising. NIRA indicated earlier that, as of October 2018, 14.6 million cards had been issued, on an adult population that UBOS projected as 18.1 million in 2018 resulting in an exclusion rate of 19%; an exclusion rate lower than the one based on NIRA’s more recent 2020 figures. And more recently, the new Executive 68 Chased Away and Left to Die