These types of bureaucratic delays were endemic to the DRC. To this day, the official national identification cards used by every citizen in the DRC to prove their citizenship have not been updated since 1997, when the country was called Zaire. As a result, most people use their voter registration cards as a substitute form of identification. Why are the Congolese people still using their Zaire national ID cards from 1997? Because new national ID cards require that the government conduct a new national census, and the last one was conducted in 1984.
