Communications Minister, Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has said government will not relent on punitive measures against those who have failed to register their SIM Cards, using the Ghana Card.
According to her, over eight million subscribers who started the process but are yet to complete the second phase have so far been blocked.
“Those who have linked their SIM cards to their Ghana card in the first phase of the registration exercise, but have not gone on to conclude the registration exercise by doing the biometric capture phase, are those whose SIMs have been blocked,” she said.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the 14th ITU Kaleidoscope event in Accra, Madam Owusu-Ekuful reiterated that the exercise is a step in the right direction to sanitise the system.
“It is important that we do this because without the security of our devices we are all at risk. There are fraudsters and criminals out there who are using the anonymity of the internet and social media to defraud others, and we need to ensure that no one can hide behind this anonymity,” she urged.
Many Ghanaians continue to lament their inability to register their SIM Cards, especially as the acquisition of the Ghana Card which remains the only required document has not been an easy one.
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Scores of citizens in the past days have thronged various registration centres to have their SIMs re-registered after they were blocked.
The NCA’s deadline said that subscribers who had only completed stage one of the registration process (linkage to Ghana Card) but not stage two (biometric capture) needed to be blocked by November 30, 2022.
But as of the deadline, a lot more Ghanaians are still yet to complete the process which started in October 2021.