Like many members of the ethnic-Somali community in Kenya, 60-year-old Abdi Khalif Aden has never had a national ID despite multiple attempts to get one.

Aden has been clinging on to his uncle’s identification card as the only thing that offers some tentative proof he was born in Kenya.

Typically for his pastoralist community, Aden was born at home and has no birth certificate.

He has therefore faced a rigorous process in front of a vetting panel to acquire a national ID card — something most Kenyans get automatically.

“Being without an ID is very hard,” he told AFP. “You can’t even move around… you can’t access basic services.”

When he last applied in 2014, despite paying 7,000 Kenyan shillings ($54), he says he was told: “We don’t know you.”

ID vetting was introduced in some areas in the 1990s due to national security concerns, but rights groups say the process discriminates against Muslim-majority communities in the predominantly Christian country.

Moses Gwovi, a senior officer at Namati, a Kenyan group specialising in citizenship rights, said the vetting committees “wielded unchecked power in determining whether applicants get ID documentation”.

“Without an ID card, one has no rights at all as a citizen. Every aspect of a person’s life is crushed,” Gwovi said.

Kenya still has 2.5 million people, nine percent of adults, without ID, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Corruption has long plagued the registration process, a report by the Kenya National Human Rights Commission found.

Aden, a father of four, has applied three times since 1997. He remembers being bypassed during one vetting process because another applicant paid more to secure a spot.

“I give up,” he said.

 Never voted

Aden’s father left the family when he was young, and his uncle’s documents — a UNICEF meal card and a tax card dating back to the 1990s — are all he has to prove his citizenship.

That has left him confined for his entire life in the remote Wajir County, about 680 kilometres (422 miles) from Nairobi, and, despite living through four Kenyan presidents, he has never voted.

It also landed him in jail for almost seven months after a police officer asked him for identification.

Like many in the region, he has often relied on nearby refugee camps for food and shelter — and this can add to difficulties when applying for citizenship.

In January, a court ruled Kenyan Somalis were wrongly denied citizenship because they were designated as refugees.

Things could improve for Aden after President William Ruto announced this month that vetting committees in the region would be abolished.

“We want the people of Northern Kenya to feel equal to the rest of the country,” Ruto said.

No anchor in law

While rights groups welcomed Ruto’s announcement, his critics say he is just chasing votes ahead of the next election in 2027.

“He is trying to woo the northeastern province, especially the Somali community,” Kenyan lawyer and politician Ekuru Aukot told AFP.

It is also not clear Ruto can grant citizenship to the affected people without new legislation.

“What he did is a roadside declaration, which has no anchor in law,” said Nairobi lawyer Noordean Khagai, who represents the Nubian Community Forum.

The Nubian community in Kenya is another group that complains of “discriminatory” vetting process, despite not residing in border counties.

For years, they were labelled “stateless”, having been brought from Sudan by the British military about a century ago and settled in various areas, including Kibera, a Nairobi slum.

Though they number around 100,000 and know no other home but Kenya, Nubians still struggle to gain full recognition of their nationality and often feel forced to adopt indigenous Kenyan names to ease the registration process, Khagai said.

Some politicians still say vetting is needed to counter the threat from jihadist militants crossing the porous Kenya-Somalia border.

But corruption may be a bigger problem: just last week, local media reported the arrest of a Kenyan village chief accused of illegally processing identity cards for Somali terror suspects.