CPP urges NIA to speed up Ghana card issuance

The Convention People’s Party (CPP) has urged the National Identification Authority (NIA) to speed up its process in the issuance of Ghana cards to ensure no one is disenfranchised for the 2024 elections.

The Electoral Commission (EC) in a new Constitutional Instrument (CI) presented before Parliament, stipulated its intention to make the Ghana card the sole guarantor document for the continuous registration of voters.

This was met with a lot of criticism from the Minority in Parliament and some other political parties.

In an interaction with Citi News, Director of Elections for the CPP, Habeeb Yakubu, explained that it’s important the E.C and NIA harmonise their data quickly to ensure no eligible voter is disenfranchised.

“Looking at the process today, there’s also an issue of synchronization or harmonisation of NIA data and the Electoral Commission’s data. The voter register has a lot of ghost names, and cleaning it is a problem. So I think the EC is taking a step in advance or being proactive so that they fall on the Ghana card, by so doing they get the process to clean the voter register. NIA should step up their game and EC should also step up their game and see how best they can harmonise their data. It makes it easier for all of us so that no one is disenfranchised,” he entreated.

In another development the Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful on November 2, 2022, hinted at possible sanctions for persons who have deliberately refused to take part in the SIM Re-registration exercise.

The Ministry announced in October that 28,959,006 SIM cards have been linked to Ghana Cards so far.

This number represents 67.28% of the 42,749,662 total SIM cards issued nationally.

Furthermore, 18,930,664 SIM Cards have been fully registered, representing 44.28% of the total SIM cards issued.