Mass Registration Exercise By NHIA Started Today

The National Identification Authority (NIA), today November 5, 2018, began a mass registration and issuance of the national identification cards also known as Ghana Card.

Adenta a suburb of Accra was the first point of call after several complaints from the public about the NIA’s delay with the process which started in June 2018.

Some selected institutions and state agencies like the Parliament of Ghana, the Presidency and the Judiciary Service were registered and issued with the card in June 2018.

The NIA has so far issued over 80,000 cards within the last four months, mostly to workers of the state institutions.

Francis Palmdeti, who is the Director of Public Affairs at the NIA, last week confirmed to Citi News that the mass registration delayed due to insufficient Commissioners of Oath.

“Our requirement mandates that…when you don’t have the necessary documents, you should have a relative who has already registered to vouch for you under oath or two people who know you and can attest to the fact that you do not have the documents must also vouch for you under oath.”

“We realized that the Commissioners for Oath available were not adequate for our work…Because we will be deploying a lot of our people across the country and the numbers that we will be deploying, we will need a commissioner of oath to be at all the centres.”

Palmdeti said the judicial service is currently recruiting extra commissioners for the NIA saying “as of last week they had finished conducting interviews for those commissioners and are training them, after the training they should be ready to be deployed to assist us in the registration.”

“That is why we haven’t started with the mass registration. But we have the equipment and the personnel. Once this commissioner for oath element is addressed, come November [2018] we will start registration of the general public, and we will start at Adentan,” the NIA Public Affairs Director added.

The exercise will be conducted at the various polling stations of the Electoral Commission.

From Adenta, it will continue to other areas in Accra from which the registration team will move to the Volta, Northern, Upper East, Upper West, Brong Ahafo, Western, Ashanti, Eastern, Western and Central regions in that order.

The exercise is expected to last for two months in the Ashanti Region while one month will be spent on each of the remaining eight regions.