The National Communication Authority (NCA) yesterday began the implementation of sanctions against individuals who have not registered their SIM Cards.
According to a statement signed by the Authority’s Director-General, outgoing calls and data services for a sequential batch of numbers will be blocked for 2 days weekly on a rotational basis.
“MNOs [Mobile Network Operators] shall divide the unregistered SIMs into five batches for the purpose of implementing this punitive measure,” it said.
It indicated that the measures shall however exclude blocking of SMS to give defaulting subscribers the opportunity to initiate registration if they so wish.
“Subscribers who fully register their SIM Cards within the period they have been blocked will only be unblocked by the MNOs after the 48 hours to avoid the MNOs tampering with their systems intermittently,” parts of the statement read.
The Authority further asked MNOs to liaise with the Electricity Company of Ghana, Ghana Water and other service providers to ensure that their data-only SIMs are registered duly.
The NCA also directed the MNOs to configure their systems to facilitate the use of passports for non-resident Ghanaians until December 31, 2022.
“MNOs shall put disconnected SIM Cards in a holding category and current subscribers of these SIM Cards shall be given six (6) months to register their SIM cards, failing which these numbers will be churned by the MNOs.”
The full blocking of SIM cards will only begin after September 30.
The window for the re-registration of SIM cards was extended on July 31, but a month after the extension, the number of persons who have visited the offices of the network service providers to have their SIMs registered dropped by 98 percent.
Data from the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications has revealed that as of August 20, 2022, only 5,861 persons had completed the biometric capturing for the re-registration exercise, compared to over 235,000 who had registered as of July 28th, two days before the extension was announced.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri