Editorial

Check sloppiness among public-sector workers!

Our editorial yesterday praised the National Communications Authority (NCA) for its directive to mobile network operators (MNOs) to implement “punitive measures” against Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards not registered with the Ghana Card.

The measures had forced users of such SIM cards to pour in at the various offices and service centres of the telecommunication companies to reregister their SIM cards to be able to have the full benefits of their uses.

The good side notwithstanding, we also mentioned the fact that challenges were inevitable.

We said, for instance, that the acquisition of Ghana Card, the only identification (ID) card needed by resident Ghanaians for the reregistration, had been beset with challenges.

Due to the challenges relating to the Ghana Card, try as some subscribers have done, they still cannot get their SIM cards reregistered.

The worst of the challenges is that some subscribers who have already done the reregistration have had their SIM cards inadvertently blocked.

Yesterday, the Ghanaian Times gathered that the telecommunication companies were prepared to help resolve this particular problem, but they had difficulty because the system to use to do so was down almost the whole day.

We know that the present arrangement is such that even if the blocked reregistered SIM cards are unblocked, they can fully be used only after the 48-hour or two-day blocking period as it is the case for the ones not reregistered at all.

Some blocked reregistered subscribers have expressed pain for the inconvenience they have gone through, including certain important calls they could not make and what they have lost therefrom.

As we said in our editorial yesterday, implementation of new things comes with their own problems.

However, it becomes worrying when innocent people are punished because some people did not do what was expected of them.

It is as if such sloppy performance has become acceptable in the country because schedule officers and their subordinates are not sanctioned for non-performance even where everything points to the fact that such people did not care about doing the needful.

Today, we are talking about happenings in the telecommunication sector but that attitude cuts across all the sectors of the economy.

It is worrying, for example, that often some public-spirited individuals would call Electricity Company of Ghana about power cut somewhere but its workers would not care to respond to such calls promptly.

Much the same way, Ghana Water Company Limited workers take their own time to fix burst or leaking pipes— sometimes days or even weeks or more pass before they act.

Elsewhere, even chief executive officers and ministers of state resign or are fired for the sloppiness of their subordinates.

For instance, in April last year, the Taiwanese Transport Minister, Lin Chia Lung, resigned for a train crash that killed 49 people and left 200 injured.

He was not driving the train, neither was he in charge of the railway maintenance truck that slid down an embarkment and onto the rail trackto cause the accident.

Ghana seems to be glorifying haphazardness and negligence by public workers.

This must stop, beginning with the SIM card reregistration.

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