Ursula Extends SIM Registration Exercise; Calls It “Temporary Moratorium”

The Minister for Communication and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu Erkuful has extended the national SIM registration exercise to the end of October 2022.

According to the Minister, this is not an extension but a “moratorium”.

It will be recalled the Minister vowed the third deadline for the execrise was not going to be extended after the July 2022 deadline.

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.

This, according to her, means that almost 10 million SIM card users have completed the first stage and have, however, refused to proceed with the second stage to complete the registration.

“There is no excuse for this since these individuals have their Ghana cards and have started the process and had ample opportunity to fully register their SIM Cards including through the self-registration App which is the first of its kind in the world”.

In dealing with this, the Minister said, SIM cards which haven’t been fully registered will be deactivated from the end of October 2022.

“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”, she said.

“All other unregistered SIMs will also be blocked progressively”, she added.

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