The Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA) has explained why his outfit was not able to carry out the printing of the Ghana Cards for sometime.
Prof Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah said the NIA was faced with financial challenges.
According to him, although there are cards and capable staff to carry on with the printing process, a private company in the arrangement is owed a considerable amount of money, hence their refusal to release the Ghana Cards to the NIA.
“Since about August of last year, we have experienced financial constraints in the system and it created a situation where even though we have 3.5 million stock of cards in a bonded warehouse, we are unable to assess the cards because of financial difficulty….,” he explained in an interview on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday.
Currently, about 2.5 million cards are yet to be printed.
Prof Agyemang Attafuah added that as of February 19th, the NIA has over 17 million people registered for the Ghana Card. However, there are 541,521 cards that have also not been printed.
Prof Attafuah assured that the outstanding cards will be printed in six months.
This, he said is because the government on Friday cleared some of the debts, therefore NIA is hopeful that “going into next week, cards will be released.
“Now when cards are released, 541,521 cards can be printed in less than two weeks,” he assured.
Meanwhile, a Political Scientist and Fellow at the Centre for Democratic and Development (CDD-Ghana), has called for the National Identification Authority (NIA) to be financially resourced to aid its work.
This, Dr John Osae-Kwapong explains, is because the Ghana Card is an important document.
According to him, when the Authority is financed, they would be able to make registration for the Ghana Card by eligible voters smooth.
“It looks like one of the biggest challenges that the NIA faced as he described it, was financial constraints and so when you remove that bottleneck, then the ability of the Authority to register people who present themselves should not necessarily be a problem,” he said.