Director announced that only 15.27 million cards had been issued as of May 31, 2021, suggesting progress of fewer than only 40,000 NICs from the 2020 numbers. It appears that over the past four years, NIRA has been unable to either close the gap of unregistered adults or to keep up with the growing number of young people who turn 18 every year and become eligible for the NIC.184 A major barrier remains that despite efforts to decentralise NIRA services, NIRA is still a very centralised enterprise. At present, all data still needs to be physically transported from the regional offices to NIRA headquarters in Kampala on secured hard drives in order to be processed. NIRA has also had a large backlog in processing applications. The Minister for Internal Affairs estimated in March of 2020 that 2.7 million applications were still pending.185 Verification of citizenship is often the stage where applications get ‘stuck,’ with 2.1 million backlogged applications waiting to be confirmed.186 The Minister of Internal Affairs confirmed the difficulties with this process, including the fact that citizenship verification of children was triggering an automated freeze on the applications of their parents, leaving both in limbo.187 The Maragoli experience would suggest that this is not just a randomly distributed administrative problem, but that the process has targeted certain groups of people whose bona fides as Ugandans are not accepted. Furthermore, those who are ultimately not considered citizens and noncitizen residents in Uganda are completely shut out of the current national ID system, as plans to issue cards to resident aliens have stalled.188 There are also groups who failed to pick up their national ID card, perhaps because they are ill, disabled or do not have the money or time to travel to a pickup point. Other groups have lost or misplaced their identity credentials and have either been unable or unwilling to replace them. Many young adults, like Nyirira, were not registered during the Learner’s Project mass registration exercise, which was plagued by difficulties, including staff mismanagement, equipment challenges, and electricity outages. This led a Parliamentary Committee to conclude that “the entire exercise of registering learners should be redesigned and repeated because the work was shoddy.”189 Finally, there are those who fall into what might be called a data error gap: those who have registered and received identity credentials but have errors on the NIR and/or NIC. This creates a gap between their actual identity and their recorded identity that renders the national ID ineffective. These impacts are not randomly distributed. Physical distance to the registration point affects those in rural, poor communities most significantly. Legal barriers such as lack of recognition in the constitution affects minority communities such as the Maragoli especially. High costs for replacement services and correcting errors will deter those who cannot afford the 50,000 UGX fee—the equivalent of two months of SCG cash transfer benefits—not to mention the costs of travelling to relevant registration points. People in the lowest wealth quintile were found to be more likely to bear costs and encounter challenges.190 Furthermore, waiting times appear to be significantly higher for female participants, for reasons that the study was unable to establish.191 Since the cost of replacing a national ID are prohibitive for many, those who are in poorer wealth quintiles are often unable to replace their IDs when lost or damaged: of the people who had lost their national ID, only 28.5% had been able to replace it.192 How a National Security Approach to Uganda’s National Digital ID Has Led to Wholesale Exclusion of Women and Older Persons 69