Ghana Ministry of Communication and Digitisation has officially extended the SIM card re-registration exercise to September 30, 2022.
This was announced by Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Ministry of Communication and Digitisation.
“Upon consultation with the industry and in view of the challenges enumerated above, I have very reluctantly decided to grant a conditional extension. The programme will be extended to 30th September to end on the anniversary of its commencement.” the Minister said in a press briefing.
“That will give us one full year of SIM registration. It will be reviewed at the end of this month and any SIM that has not been fully registered by the end of August will be barred from receiving certain services including voice and data services,” she said.
Many people had been struggling with the re-registration exercise due to logistic problems with the printing of their Ghana cards.
“The statistics indicate that there was a 90% drop in SIM reregistration, as soon as the first deadline was extended on 21st March. Until a week ago there were no queues, people started going to register when they realised that the deadline was imminent after going to sleep.”
“The mobile network operators, NCA, and the NIA have all engaged additional staff, procured the necessary logistics and are incurring significant expenses to conduct this exercise successfully, any extension of the process increases their cost,” she added.
According to data from the National Identity Authority, only 15.7 million users have been able to obtain their Ghana Card. (Ghana’s estimated population is currently 30 million)
12 million citizens, according to the Minister of Communications and Digitisation, have been able to fully register their SIM cards.
