The Communications Minister, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful has debunked accusations that her outfit is not in good terms with the National Identification Authority (NIA) – body responsible for providing citizens with the Ghana card.
“The level of collaboration between my Ministry and the Interior Ministry, and the National Identification Authority (NIA) is very high. I spoke to the sector Minister over there even this morning before coming here and he confirmed the additional period to help solve all their issues, so the collaboration is very strong,” she said.
The Minister was speaking at a press briefing yesterday, July 31, 2022 when she announced an extension of the SIM card re-registration to September 30, 2022.
“Upon consultation with the industry and in view of the challenges enumerated above, I have very reluctantly decided to grant a conditional extension. The programme will be extended to 30th September to end on the anniversary of its commencement.
“That will give us one full year of SIM registration. It will be reviewed at the end of this month and any SIM that has not been fully registered by the end of August will be barred from receiving certain services including voice and data services,” she said.
The Minister further noted that despite the challenges with the Ghana Card – long queues among others – many Ghanaians failed to register their SIMs after the deadline was extended.
Thus, this extension of the deadline she indicated is the final one.
“The statistics indicate that there was a 90% drop in SIM reregistration, as soon as the first deadline was extended on 21st March. Until a week ago there were no queues, people started going to register when they realised that the deadline was imminent after going to sleep.
“The mobile network operators, NCA, and the NIA have all engaged additional staff, procured the necessary logistics and are incurring significant expenses to conduct this exercise successfully, any extension of the process increases their cost,” she added.
SIM registration timeline
The SIM re-registration commenced on October 1, 2021. The six-month exercise which was expected to end on March 31, 2022, was extended by another 4 months to July 31, 2022.
That extension was granted to enable over 7.5 million Ghanaians and residents who had not obtained Ghana Cards at the time to register their SIM.
Current SIM Registration Statistics
The Minister said as of July 20, 2022, the total number of Voice SIMs stood at 41, 979,398. Out of this number, 15,395,607 had linked their Ghana Card to their sim cards.
Source: Modern Ghana