Minister of Communications, Digital Technology, and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, says the previous SIM registration exercise under the former Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, did not meet the required biometric standards and therefore cannot be considered valid.
In an interview on TV3, he argued that the earlier process failed to authenticate subscriber data. “The registrations that were purported to have been done by Ursula Owusu and the NPP did not cross-reference the biometric they took from you against that database. Nothing of that sort was done,” he stated.
According to him, government will begin a fresh and properly regulated SIM registration exercise in the first quarter of 2026.
“The L.I is ready and again I am meticulous about what I am doing. First quarter next year, we will run it out. We are currently at the Public Procurement Authority doing the procurement of the service provider to do the SIM registration,” he said.
He explained that the legislative instrument to guide the process has been completed.
“We have drafted the L.I and it will be laid before Parliament because again there must be a proper legal basis for what we are doing. Already, there’s been testing, there’s been all kinds of things done by the regulator,” he added.
Mr. George dismissed the claim that government is undertaking another round of re-registration. “We are not doing a re-registration. We are doing a SIM registration. You didn’t do any registration, the former Minister just wasted everybody’s time,” he said.
He revealed that the ministry has been working with key agencies to integrate and verify existing data.
“So, now we have sat down with the Interior Minister and his head of agency, Yayra Koku at NIA. We have worked out the integration between the Telco, the regulator, NCA and the NIA,” he explained.
The Minister said much of the biometric data gathered between 2021 and 2023 was not linked to any central identity system.
“All the biometrics they (NPP) collected, it was just sitting in databases scattered all over the place. We have picked those databases and we are now cleaning them up and cross-referencing them with the NIA in the backend. About 80% of them have been done,” he noted.
