The Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has said that the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) should be blamed for the long queues at sim card re-registration centres.
“I need to make this point: even before the elections were done, and this [sim] card registration exercise took off, I believe in 2018 or thereabouts, the National Democratic Congress told its members not to register and to boycott it,” Owusu-Ekuful said on The Asaase Breakfast Show on Wednesday (23 March).
“So, the queues we are seeing currently are directly attributable to that action that the NDC took. If we had all availed ourselves of that opportunity at that time, everybody who wanted a card would have gotten it by now and we wouldn’t have been seeing the queues,” she told the ABS host Kwaku Nhyira-Addo.
“It is through no fault of the National Identification Authority: it is those who did not register at the time the nationwide registration exercise was opened who are having to go through this thing.
“So let’s lay the blame where it [should be] and stop beating NIA over a situation which wasn’t their own doing.”
Owusu-Ekuful urged Ghanaians to stop politicising national exercises in the future.
“And let me appeal to everyone that when there is a national exercise, let’s not politicise it. Because, at the end of the day, it is the citizen who suffers. It is not the party which is queueing to acquire the card …” she said.
Meanwhile, the deadline for the sim card re-registration has been extended from the end of March to 31 July 2022, the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation announced on Tuesday (22 March).
The Ghana Card is the main requirement for re-registration.
Fred Dzakpata
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