The CEO of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey, has clarified that the previous SIM card registration exercise was incomplete rather than useless.
His statement follows the Minister-Designate for Communications, Digital Technology, and Innovation, Sam Nartey George’s announcement of a new SIM re-registration process to address flaws in the earlier exercise.
In 2022, the government mandated SIM cardholders to link their numbers to their Ghana Cards. However, inefficiencies, long queues, and SIM blockages plagued the process.
During his vetting, Sam George criticized these challenges and promised a smoother system integrated with the National Identification Authority (NIA) database.
Speaking on Eyewitness News on Citi FM on February 3, Ashigbey explained:
“I wouldn’t say it is useless. I would say it was incomplete. The biometric data collected was not reading properly.”
He highlighted that fingerprint data was not captured as accurately as the NIA’s system, stressing the need to use the NIA database as the “single point of truth.”
Ashigbey noted that while the first phase of SIM registration verified data against the NIA, the second phase—biometric verification—was flawed.
“We do the liveliness test, we do the likeliness test, we collect the biometric data, but we don’t compare it with the single point of truth, which is the NIA database,” he stated.
He urged authorities to close this gap to ensure a more effective registration process.
