The National Communications Authority (NCA) has explained that Ghana’s planned nationwide SIM re-registration exercise is aimed at correcting irregularities discovered during previous registration efforts.
According to the Director-General of the NCA, Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko, the new exercise will help create a more reliable and credible national subscriber database.
His comments come after the Government of Ghana announced plans to roll out another SIM re-registration exercise across the country.
Speaking in an interview on Channel One TV on Monday, March 9, Ing. Fianko revealed that the upcoming exercise will be the third official SIM registration process conducted in Ghana.
He explained that the first SIM registration exercise was carried out in 2011 but faced major challenges due to the absence of proper identity verification systems.
“This will be the third official registration process. The first one was done in 2011. The challenge with it is that there was no verification at all of the IDs. What we did was a manual verification of some limited cases along the way,” he said.
According to him, the second SIM registration exercise was designed to strengthen the process by requiring subscribers to link their SIM cards to the Ghana Card issued by the National Identification Authority (NIA).
However, he noted that the exercise was not fully completed because a planned biometric verification stage was never implemented.
“There was supposed to be verification of the ID card; we did one part of it, but the second part didn’t happen. The policymaker, NIA, couldn’t get alignment to do the second phase, which was the validation of the biometric,” he explained.
The NCA Director-General also disclosed that investigations during the previous exercise uncovered several irregularities within the system.
These included cases where individuals used fake photographs or incorrect identification documents to register SIM cards.
“There are cases, including fake photos, where the same name is used by a different person. We saw fake IDs used to register,” he revealed.
According to Ing. Fianko, the upcoming re-registration exercise aims to establish a reliable system where subscriber identities can be properly verified using trusted national data.
“What we want to do is to have a single source of truth. We want to ensure the ID details are correct and that the person who brought the ID is indeed the person,” he said.
The NCA boss further assured the public that the new SIM re-registration exercise will be completely free and that subscribers will not be required to pay any fees to register their SIM cards.
Authorities say the initiative forms part of broader efforts by the government and telecommunications regulators to strengthen SIM registration procedures, improve national security and ensure accurate identification of mobile phone users across the country.
