According to the Chief Executive of the Ghana Telecommunications Chamber, Ken Ashigbey, telecommunication companies have had to procure more devices and personnel to aid in the SIM registration process.
Speaking on the sidelines of the launch of the Mobile Industry Transparency Initiative, 2021 he said: “There are development costs that went into being able to put our systems in place to align with the NCA’s systems to be able to do the verifications, there’s an app we use that we pay for. Before the policy came in place, most of our agents were using feature phones to do registration but now for them to be able to do it, we need smartphones, so it cost a lot of money to be able to do that.”
“Then you have to recruit extra people needed to be able to do the exercise and we had to pay those people that we recruited and that is cost. The collaboration between the NCA and NIA needs to be stronger. We need to collaborate a lot more so that the verification processes will be tighter.”
Ashigbey added that when the NCA and NIA are able to collaborate effectively when anyone is “on the database, I don’t need to hold my card to be able to register.”
He, therefore, called on the NCA, the Ministry of Communications to hasten the process to end the registration and also make room for persons who are yet to register their SIM cards.
