NCA abused powers over sim card blockage – Minority
The Minority in Parliament led by its leader, Haruna Iddrisu has accused the National Communications Authority (NCA) of exceeding their mandates of the law by blocking Ghanaians of their sim cards.
According to them, today, digitalization and ICT are directly tied to key Fundamental Rights including the Right to privacy and communication “as no person’’ should be subjected to interference with the privacy of his communication’’. (Article 18 supra)
Addressing a press conference on Tuesday at parliament house, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu said “It is the view of the minority that the NCA is acting ultra vires in curtailing the exercise and enjoyment of the Right to privacy of communication.
The government is proceeding erroneously as if every Ghanaian has a Ghana card. This is simply not true; it is not the case.”
The ministry and the NCA is simply ignoring the legitimate concerns of Ghanaians who are crying and saying ’we do not have the Ghana card, help us access this public goods.’
SIM card owners in Ghana who failed to re-register their cards started facing punitive actions on Monday, September 5, 2022, ahead of the September 30 deadline.
The minority says the punitive actions are unreasonable, explaining that to completely cut telecommunication services to subscribers for no other reason than to limit usage by citizens is the lowest point in a nation’s telecommunications development.
“It is a backward regulatory/policy prescription to follow in any regime. Too much reliance of rules/regulations exposes a communications system as immature.
The moment a Telecommunication Regulator reinforces control of the sector through plenty rules and regulations, then it supposes that the sick cannot incentivize to bring competition investments to grow the industry. Countries with mature telecommunication environment have fewer or minimal regulations.”
In a related development, the NCA has indicated individuals whose SIM cards will be blocked after the September 30 deadline set for the re-registration exercise can only retrieve them within a six-month grace period.
Unregistered SIM cards will afterwards be completely removed from the system.
