I pity citizens of countries with boring governments that do nothing spectacular for years on end.

Imagine having a government that just collects taxes, delivers satisfactory social services and keeps everybody’s life and property safe. Some of us would die yawning.

In my exciting homeland of Uganda, we recently broke another world record, one of the many that we hold.

We have become the first and only country in the world that has issued more diplomatic passports than national identity cards! Tell me who can beat that?

We can estimate the number of Ugandan diplomatic and official passports in circulation at about four thousand.

We can only estimate because the Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control also doesn’t know exactly how many have been issued.

If we count 70 ministers and their spouses, plus 130 district commissioners with their spouses, that is already four hundred dignitaries.  

Add nearly 400 MPs with spouses, a thousand or so senior government officials, 400 senior diplomats and their families, then throw in 500 security operatives with their partners who also prefer the special passports, and you get 4,000. 

And the national IDs, which are supposed to be issued to every peasant and labourer? Only about 400 have been issued.

In other words, there are 10 times more diplomatic passports in circulation than citizen IDs.

Besides the numbers, the second record is on costs. Ours is the most expensive national ID in the world, costing a quarter of a million dollars to produce one piece. We beat the United States, Kuwait, the Scandinavians.

We spent several years collecting citizens’ data, and then went to the world’s renowned centre of efficiency, Germany, to procure our IDs.

Without including the cost of the years-long data collection, we spent about $100 million on 400 pieces of IDs.

We have seen some pictures of the $250,000 worth ID issued to some citizens. The exercise is now over, the ID making equipment discarded, declared officially missing by the relevant minister.

The third record simultaneously set in this deal is the highest relative cost of producing an ID compared with a passport.

Today, the price of a Ugandan passport that has at least 36 pages, a good cover and digital identification security features of internationally acceptable standards is $30.

But at an average cost of $250,000, the national ID costs over 8,000 times more to produce than the passport.

I haven’t touched the new Ugandan ID yet but I’m sure the computer chip embedded in it is made of gold worth $250,000.

I think our government wants every Ugandan to have that much security on them wherever they go with their ID.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]