Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has said that plans are underway to ensure that all active SIM cards in the country will start getting re-registered with National Identification Cards from the end of June or early July.
According to him, those who fail to re-register their SIM card risk getting their SIM cards deactivated over time.
Speaking at the 5th Ghana CEO Summit, which is underway in Accra, the Vice President noted that the move is part of plans to rid the country’s cyberspace of fraud.
“I expect that the Minister for Communications and Digitalization [Ursula Owusu Ekuful] will soon announce the date for re-registration of the SIM card. Maybe by the end of June or beginning of July this year, everybody will have to register their SIM with a National ID number.”
“We all have to do that otherwise we’ll lose that SIM card. That will really give us a real identity for all MoMo transactions. For example, it takes away fraud that is taking place like SIM box and through MoMo”, he added.
Furthermore, the Vice President said “we’re also digitizing the Births and Death Registry; the digitization is 80% complete.
“What we are putting in place is a system, so that from next year when a child is born within a month, each child will be given a unique National ID number,” he said.
The Births and Death registry digitization is being done via the yet-to-be-launched Ghana.Gov platform, which was designed and built by three Ghanaians Fintechs – Hubtel, ExpressPay and IT Consortium.
Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia also expressed government’s commitment to rebuild a resilient economy through policy response and strategies.
According to him, the country will achieve this through digitization of the economy, which will trigger more revenue growth and expansion of the economy.
Indeed, the Ghana.gov platform, which puts all government services on one online portal, promises to seal the revenue leakage at MMDAs and save the country GHC2 billion in lost revenue and improve revenue collection by GHC3 billion.
The Vice President said “We have to move into a new economy because it is going to provide a single source of truth and a unique identity for all transactions across the spectrum. And so this year, what we’ve been doing since we came into office has been the integration of the national ID card database with other key databases.
“We’ve integrated it with SSNIT, we’ve integrated with GRA. And with GRA, for example up to 2016, TIN numbers in Ghana were 750,000. By making the TIN number our national ID number, we’ve immediately increased it from 750,000 to 15.5 million as of now.”
