Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey, the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, has clarified that the previous SIM card registration exercise was not a failure but rather incomplete.
His comments come in response to the Minister-Designate for Communications, Digital Technology, and Innovation, Sam Nartey George, who announced plans for a new SIM card re-registration process to address issues from the previous initiative.
In 2022, the government required SIM cardholders to link their numbers to their Ghana Cards. However, the exercise faced significant challenges, including inefficiencies, long queues, and SIM blockages for non-compliance.
During his vetting, Sam George criticized these issues and pledged to implement a smoother system that would integrate directly with the National Identification Authority (NIA) database.
Ashigbey explained, “I wouldn’t say it is useless. I would say it was incomplete. The issue was that the biometric data collected was not reading properly.” He highlighted that the fingerprint data captured during the registration was less accurate than the NIA’s system, stressing the importance of using the NIA database as the “single point of truth.”
“What we should have done was use the NIA database to complete the cycle,” Ashigbey remarked. He explained that while the first phase of the registration process involved verifying data against the NIA database, the second phase, which included biometric verification, was flawed. “We do the liveliness test, 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 said.
Ashigbey emphasized the need to address this gap in order to ensure the new SIM card registration process is both comprehensive and effective.
