More than 15.7 million eligible citizens have received their Ghana Cards since the registration exercise started in 2019, the Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Prof. Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, has disclosed.

Prof. Agyemang Attafuah, giving a breakdown of the total number of registered cards, stated that 16,969,034 persons have registered for the Ghana Card, with about 16,535,623 cards printed.

He further indicated that out of the 16,969,034 printed cards, 808,493 Ghanaians have not been issued with their Ghana Cards.

The NIA boss stated that the non-issuance of the Ghana Card is not a deliberate attempt to frustrate the Ghanaian people.

Prof. Attafuah ascribed double-registration, change of vital data as the cause of non-issued Ghana Cards.

He disclosed that, “there are people who have double-registered. That is potentially a criminal offence. Those ones are being individually investigated. There are those whose cards have gone into adjudication, not because of double registration but because they have sought to change their vital data in the custody of the authority, such as bio-data. For such people, the system arrests their application, and it joins a queue.”

The NIA boss touted that until the outstanding issues are rectified, some Ghanaians can not receive their cards.

Meanwhile, the Ghana Card is the sole identification document being used for the SIM card re-registration exercise nationwide. The exercise which commenced on October 1, 2021, is expected to end July 31, 2022.

Earlier, the Government extended the deadline for the registration of SIM from March, 31st 2022 to 31st July 2022 due to the low number of SIM card registration recorded.

Government has insisted on not extending the deadline, therefore, citizens who fail to comply with the directive before the deadline will have their SIM cards deactivated.

Source: The Independent Ghana