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The Minister-nominee for Communications, Digitalisation, and Innovation, Samuel Nartey George, has strongly criticised former President Nana Akufo-Addo’s administration for its decision to re-register SIM cards.
According to him, the directive “lacked common sense,” arguing that it was counterproductive since the biometrics of Ghanaians had already been captured in the national repository of the National Identification Authority (NIA).
Responding to a question before the Appointment Committee during his vetting on Friday, 30th January, Sam George described the move as the “highest order of wickedness.”
The actions that happened under the last government were very at par with common sense and logic. We've got a national identification authority that holds and sits as our national repository of biometric data. I think it was wickedness of the highest order to subject Ghanaians to long hours of queues, taking away productive man-hours, affecting our economy to go and queue again and resubmit biometrics simply because egos could not be managed.
The minister-designate further disclosed plans to conduct a new SIM registration exercise but assured that it would come at no cost to taxpayers or the public purse.
We will do a proper SIM re-registration again, but this time nobody's going to queue because common sense will prevail, expertise will prevail, and logic will work. The MNOs hold a certain set of data. We would use technology to cross-reference that against the NIA database and all biometric databases.
In October 2021, the erstwhile administration, led by former Minister of Communications Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, commenced the re-registration of SIM cards in a bid to rid the country’s cyberspace of fraud, monitor digital activities, and track down individuals who use their phones for criminal activities.