False Promise of Biometrics

Three-country investigation shows digital IDs in Africa failing to deliver promised democratic and development boost, while making fortunes for tech vendors

Some of the world’s poorest countries have been investing heavily in digital ID systems which it is claimed will deliver democratic and development dividends. Africa has been at the forefront of this push supported by the World Bank, UN agencies and the international community. Some of Africa’s most fragile states have been encouraged to spend billions of dollars on biometric systems from national IDs to voting systems.

While Africa has become a lucrative market for multinational tech vendors, the promised benefits of trustworthy election results and a revolutionising of the way that states deliver vital services is far harder to discern.

At the 2024 ID4Africa trade fair in South Africa, the promises kept coming: economic growth, empowering individuals, reducing government spending, enabling trust and being a key tool in solving humanitarian crises.

The conference sponsors include a who’s who of companies that have benefited from contracts meant to confer legitimacy on electoral processes and unlock the potential of Africa’s demographic advantage over other ageing continents.

A legal identity is among the UN’s sustainable development goals, where it is defined as a fundamental human right. The drive to meet this goal has seen near-bankrupt states prioritise the capture and storage of biometric data from iris scans and fingerprints to facial images.

We set out to investigate what has become of the blockbuster deals struck in sub-Saharan Africa. What has actually been delivered? Who has benefited? How have they been financed? And how have people on the ground in those countries been affected?

METHODS

As well as exploring the biometrics industry and how it has courted customers in a “frontier market” our investigation focused on a representative cross section of African countries where big tech investments have gone in three distinct directions.

In Uganda, where supposedly democratic elections have failed to deliver a change of government in four decades, we explored how a Chinese tech vendor provided biometric systems which have become the foundations for a surveillance state.

In Mozambique, we probe the worsening conduct of elections in a fragile democracy. The gas-rich nation is beset by rising poverty and a brutal counter insurgency, but its ballooning biometrics costs have failed to breed confidence in democracy.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we investigate a succession of phantom biometrics deals which have seen billions of dollars committed on paper but have so far failed to deliver a national population registry or any functioning ID cards across successive governments.

Working with partners, Bloomberg, over the course of nine months, the team combined in-depth ground reporting with expert interviews and accounts from confidential sources to reconstruct deals in the three countries from tender process to societal fallout. In support of these testimonies, we analysed thousands of pages of documents, ranging from bank records and business registries to unpublished contracts and correspondence between governments, vendors and middle men.

The result is the most detailed account yet of the failed promise of biometric technologies and one that looks at the accompanying harms for affected communities, as well as wrongdoing by several companies and individuals.

STORYLINES

Over the last decade debt-ridden Mozambique has bought a succession of multi-million-dollar contracts for biometric voter registration equipment. Whilst mass voter registration had been sold as a way to improve the credibility of elections in fragile democracies, in Mozambique it has shown how these technologies can be used to create new ways to fix results.

At the centre of the election business are the Sidats, three wealthy brothers with strong ties to the ruling party, Frelimo. In 2018, a company owned by two of the brothers, Artes Gráficas, brought in South African tech vendor, Laxton, to provide a biometric voter registration kit ahead of the country’s presidential elections.

But the process was marred by irregularities, which included inflated voter numbers in areas sympathetic to the ruling party.

Sources inside the government and former employees told us Laxton was aware of these issues. Yet, in 2023, Laxton won an ‘exceptional’ no-bid tender for $127 million, to provide a new set of voter registration technology. Behind the scenes, internal documents and meeting minutes reveal there were serious concerns inside the government electoral body over Laxton’s equipment and the technology’s value for money.

In 2023, the voter registration equipment was again critical to Frelimo efforts to suppress and manipulate the vote.

With the next presidential election in October, Laxton’s technology has already played a key role in whether millions of Mozambicans will be eligible to vote.

“In Mozambique elections are not free and fair,” said a senior international diplomat who did not want to be identified out of concern for his safety and the sensitive nature of the subject. Biometric technology, the person said, “is mostly a way for Mozambican companies to make money.”

In Uganda, where a national ID system ought to be a success story, we find it feeding a sweeping surveillance state built in cooperation with China’s Huawei. Nick Opiyo, one of East Africa’s leading human rights lawyers, who has defended victims of government crackdowns, has been a victim of widespread digital surveillance.

A succession of biometric tools have become central to many of the day to day functions of the state and also a powerful mechanism for surveilling politicians, journalists, human rights defenders and ordinary citizens.

A $126 million deal with Huawei has given Uganda the capacity to deploy facial and number plate recognition technology, as well as AI capabilities. Sensitive personal data, required to register a SIM card or make a bank transaction, can be accessed at will by state actors with no due process.

“There’s almost no confidentiality in my work any more,” Opiyo told Bloomberg. “There’s pervasive fear and self censorship.”

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, long plagued by violence, hunger and unemployment, the absence of a civil registry makes proving who you are into an ordeal.

Citizens have to find workarounds in the struggle to access services, open bank accounts or receive money from relatives abroad. Successive Congolese governments have promised to solve the identity crisis and presented increasingly expensive biometric ID schemes as the solution.

For all the promises, no actual ID system has emerged. When we investigated, what we found instead was a series of complex contracts used to conceal shell companies, secret negotiations and hidden payments.

A glitzy shopping mall is all that materialised from one failed scheme involving Belgian company Semlex. Analysing thousands of pages of unpublished and confidential documents, we found that Semlex boss Albert Karaziwan had approached then DRC president Joseph Kabila in 2014, offering a free citizen’s ID to be subsidised by income from sales of expensive passports, also to be produced by Semlex. After the passport sales began, however, sources told us how money was diverted away from the ID project and into the construction of the Hypnose shopping complex – seen as a safe way for Kabila to store his money.

A second round of ID procurement by new president Felix Tshisekedi resulted in a blockbuster contract valued at $1.2 billion for French vendor Idemia and its local partners. But as civil servants raised the alarm about financial irregularities and the risk of an “enormous scam”, and with the World Bank refusing to fund the project, production of IDs ground to a halt with only Tshisekedi himself and a few hundred VIPs having received them.