Accra, May 04, GNA-The Centre for Public Opinion and Awareness (CenPOA), a Civil Society Organization (CSO), has urged the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization to urgently take steps to address the challenges of the SIM card reregistration exercise.
The organization viewed that if the issue was not addressed properly, it could have the potential to derail the exemplary success and the already visible positive impacts of the SIM reregistration exercise.
“The issues may raise serious issues about the integrity of the whole national biometric SIM registration exercise if incidents of unknown numbers linked to people’s ID cards become too many beyond scientifically acceptable thresholds,” the CSO said.
Mr Michael N. Mensah, the Executive Director, CenPOA, expressed concern in a letter to the Ministry and copied to the Ghana News Agency about complaints by sections of the public that their SIM cards linked to unknown numbers.
“For an individual’s identification to be linked to unknown numbers goes to prove that there were either system errors or a manipulation of the system.”
“We only hope that the former is true because the latter will mean that the SIM registration exercise may have been an effort of futility,” the statement said.
The statement said the national SIM reregistration exercise received support and participation from most Ghanaians because of its anticipated benefits, even though the process was fraught with challenges.
It said, during the registration period, some Ghanaians and civil society actors expressed skepticism about the processes, doubting the integrity and security of the data that were being collected by third-party telecos.
It said information from the National Communications Authority on the total number of SIM registrations as of November 30, 2022, revealed that 22,443,323 SIM cards had been successfully registered, with 8,759,090 deactivated.
“We understand that these 22,443,323 individual registrations may include multiple SIM cards linked to a single individual,” it said.
The statement commended stakeholders for announcing the short code 4021# to check the number of SIM cards registered to an ID.
GNA