SIM Registration: Minister Takes 4 Decisions After September 30 Deadline

The Minister for Communication and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu Erkuful has announced four decisions she has taken after the third deadline for the SIM registration exercise elapsed.

First, she has extended the deadline to the end of this month.

Ursula chooses to rather call it a temporary moratorium rather than an extension.

After October, persons who have only linked their Ghana cards to the SIM cards will have their SIM cards deactivated.

“All SIM cards that have been linked to Ghana cards (i.e. completed stage 1 registration) but have not completed their stage 2 registration will be blocked from the end of October. This is not an extension of the deadline but a temporary moratorium to encourage these individuals to complete the process”.

The second decision, the Minister said, is making suitable arrangements to accommodate disabled persons in the exercise. These measures will be communicated subsequently, she noted.

For unregistered data SIM users, the Minister has decided to give them up to the end of November 2022.

“All data-only SIMs including those insured by Surfline, Busy Internet, Telesol and any institution such as ECG, have up to the end of November to complete registration”.

Ursula has also decided that persons with more than 10 SIM cards will have the excess removed from the database and blocked.

This, she said, will also address the issue with pre-registered SIM cards.

Warning SIM card vendors against preregistration of SIM cards, she said the offence correlates with a 5-year jail term.

“The NCA has been directed to conduct a mystery shopping and enforce the law against miscreants.

So far, 28,959,006 SIM cards have been linked to Ghana cards while 18, 930,664 SIM cards have completed both stages of the registration exercise.

The SIM registration exercise which began on October 1, 2021, was scheduled to end on March 31, 2022, however, the Minister extended the exercise to July 31 in favour of the over 7.5 million people who didn’t yet have their Ghana Cards- the only acceptable identification card for the exercise.

At the end of July, the Minister “reluctantly” extended the exercise again citing challenges in the registration exercise, challenges with the issuance of Ghana cards, etc.

Ahead of the September 30 deadline, the NCA instituted some punitive measures to compel the unregistered SIM users to undertake the exercise.

It included the blockage of outgoing calls and data services for 48 hours each week and the re-routing of outgoing calls to an Interactive Voice Recording (IVR) for a SIM registration sensitisation message.

Although this compelled some unregistered SIM users to register their cards, it was halted after it prompted a number of SIM users to sue the NCA.

Source: opmesuo.com/Hajara Fuseini