By Manny Pham
The Ghanaian National Communications Authority (NCA) set a hard deadline for the 11 million remaining unregistered SIM cards to be signed up, warning those SIMs will be cut off from services at the end of the month.
NCA director-general Joe Anokye announced at a briefing the deadline will be May 31, bringing an end to the SIM registration process which began on October 1, 2021.
Anokye said the 11 million unregistered SIMs are from subscribers who were originally exempt from registering including diplomats, refugees, and citizens on official duties overseas.
As of April 25, 25.2 million out of 36.5 million SIM cards have completed stages one and two of the registering process using the Ghana Card, the country’s national ID card, a requisite to be fully registered and stored on the NCA’s central SIM database.
The director general said: “We wish to assure the general public that the SIM Database has not been breached. In the first place, there has been no unauthorised access to the SIM Registration database; the identified abuses of stage one process, which have been resolved, do not amount to unauthorised access to the SIM Registration database”.
The NCA deployed yesterday (May 1) it’s shortcode system to register the remaining SIM cards, answering calls from the public for a more simplified system. Anokye added subscribers could use the system to check details linked to their Ghana Cards and unlink unwanted numbers.
Ghana’s SIM registration campaign faced setbacks which saw the regulator extend its deadline and deactivate users that were not compliant.
