The Minority in Parliament has stated that it will strongly oppose any move by the government to ‘unnecessarily’ inconvenience the citizenry with the SIM card re-registration exercise.
It said there were several requirements and clauses associated with the exercise which citizens must oppose because of abuse of the policy.
“In as much as we support any attempts to sanitise the digital ecosystem, we strongly oppose any abuse of policy to unnecessarily inconvenience Ghanaians since we find it inappropriate policy directive issues fiat of deactivating SIM cards that are not linked to Ghana Card within six months,” the Minority stressed.
At a press conference addressed by its Ranking Member on Parliament’s Committee, Samuel George, indicated that the exercise was retrospective application of legislation and tunnel versioned approach to sanitising the industry.
He noted that the current legislation that backed SIM registration in the country was Legislative Instrument (LI) 2006 passed by Parliament in 2011 which saw registration in 2012 and did not mandate linkage of Ghana Card to activate SIM cards.
“Section 7 of LI 2111 makes use of Ghana Card mandatory but does not make it sole card for purposes of registration which holds position decision by NCA to deactivate SIM cards not re-registered by March 2022 an affront to rights of Ghanaians.
“The new directive is akin to Bank of Ghana issuing fiat bank accounts will be closed if account holders do not link their accounts to Ghana Card, NIA Act also mandates bank accounts needs to be backed by Ghana Card,” Mr George pointed out.
According to him, another inconceivable scenario was Passports Office issuing a statement all passports must be revalidated because few holders may have falsified birth certificates or other primary documents used to acquire passports to deal with instances of fraudulently acquired SIM cards by unscrupulous persons.
He called for immediate withdrawal of threat of deactivation of valid SIM cards by March 2022, scrapping of physical visit to agents of service providers for authentication of registration document and integrated referencing of databases of Passport Office, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, National Health Insurance Authority and Social Security and National Insurance Trust with NIA database whose cards were used largely as primary registration documents for previous SIM registrations. –ghanaweb.com
