The Eastern Regional Director of the National Communications Authority (NCA), Kofi Osei Adjei, has insinuated that Ghanaians might not be aware of the sim card registration centres.
Commenting on why people are not willing to visit the designated registration centres, Mr. Adjei was of the view that it’s the lack of awareness of these centres available to them that is causing the long queues at the main offices of the Telcos.
“I’m using your platform to tell residents in the Eastern Region that MTN alone has 27 centres in the region with 9 customer care centres making it 36. Aside the MTN customer care centre’s main office, they have additional five centres in Koforidua”.
Kofi Osei Adjei
Mr Adjei averred that people must visit these centres assigned for the registration in order to curtail the long queues at the main offices of the Telcos.
The Eastern Regional NCA director attributed the rush in the sim card registration to Ghanaians being afraid of the deadline of the exercise and the fear of losing their sim cards. Kofi Adjei therefore appealed to the public to bear with the Telcos as they work on registering the various sim cards.
Mr Adjei indicated that the problem that has been observed since the inception of the project started in October 2021 is the lack of patronage of the registration centres. He noted that another problem is that most people prefer going to the telecommunication office thereby creating long queues.
“Even the NCA Regional office, we gave an office space for all the telcos to use as a registration centre for the registration exercise. With the other centres, there are no queues there but people are not patronizing these centres”.
Kofi Osei Adjei
Mr. Adjei revealed that the personels at the centres can sit the whole day and have just hand full of customers registering their sims.
Halt ongoing sim registration
Meanwhile, Former head of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Dr William Ahadzie, has called on government to halt the ongoing SIM card reregistration and embark on further consultation.
According to him, it is not appropriate for telcos in the country to be allowed to undertake biometric enrolment of their customers.
“In the ID world, it is advisable to build only one National biometric (civil) register. In Ghana, the law allows only the NIA to establish a national Biometric Register and to share such biometric data with USER agencies under strict conditions because of the high risk of identity theft”.
Dr William Ahadzie
His comments come after the massive public anger over queues and delays associated with the reregistration process.
The Former NIA head noted that every individual with a phone who has a Ghana card already has his/her biometrics captured by NIA and stored in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).
Dr. Ahadzie stated that NIA is capable of generating data of all customers of the Telcos for identity verification and authentication.
“Many Ghanaians have multiple phone numbers with different Telcos. They are moving from one Telco to the other at great personal risk and cost”.
Dr William Ahadzie
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