Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, Communications Minister
The Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has apportioned blame to the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) for the long queues people go through at the SIM card registration centres, urging the public to leave the National Identification Authority out of the fight.
Speaking in an interview on Asaase Breakfast Show yesterday, Mrs Owusu-Ekuful pointed out that even before the 2020 general elections, the NDC was hell-bent on dissuading members from participating in the Ghana Card registration exercise.
“I need to make this point, even before the elections were done, this [Ghana] card registration exercise took off, I believe, in 2018 thereof. The National Democratic Congress told its members not to register and to boycott it,” she said.
Blame NDC
She said the queues being experienced currently are directly attributable to that action the NDC took, noting that “if we had all availed ourselves of that opportunity at that time, everybody who wanted a card would have gotten it by now, and we wouldn’t have been seeing the queue”.
“It is through no fault of the NIA; it is those who did not register at the time the nationwide registration exercise was opened who are having to go through this thing. So, let’s lay the blame where it is, and stop beating NIA over a situation which wasn’t their own doing,” she stated.
The Minister urged Ghanaians to stop politicising national exercises in the future.
“…Let me appeal to everyone that when there is a national exercise, let’s not politicise it because at the end of the day, it is the citizen who suffer. It is not the party which is queueing to acquire the card…” she added.
The Ministry of Communications and Digitalistion on Tuesday extended the deadline for the ongoing SIM card registration exercise to July 31, 2022. It said the extension had become necessary to enable over the 7.5 million Ghanaians without Ghana cards have the opportunity to obtain their cards and have their SIM cards registered, among other things.
Mrs Owusu-Ekuful indicated that since the exercise began in 2021, 14,091,542 SIM cards had been linked to the Ghana Card, 10,348,532 Bio-Captures conducted and 99,445 New SIMS registered. “It is clear that the deadline for completion of the registration of the remaining active SIM cards cannot be met,” she added in the statement.
About The Author
