A Media Relations Officer at the National Identification Authority (NIA), Dora Badu Owusu, says people are visiting the Authority’s offices for different purposes hence the long queues.
The re-registration and registration of sim cards commenced on Friday, 1st October 2021.The exercise which is still ongoing was expected to last for six months and at least end on 31st March 2022 but it was extended to June 30, 2022.
Despite claiming to have registered about 16 million people, it has been noticed that there are still long queues at registration offices of the NIA.
Victims of the long queues sometimes have to go home and come back the next day because the NIA is able to register few and or issue few cards to those who registered earlier due to some technical challenges.
The situation is not different at the offices of the Telcos, especially MTN since it has been noted that people queue for long to get their sim cards merged with their Ghana cards.
Read Also: SSNIT and NIA numbers merger extended to June 30
Speaking on Atinka TV‘s morning show, Ghana Nie with Ekourba Gyasi Simpremu, Dora Badu said,”For the queue at the offices, the people are coming there for different purposes. Some are coming for new registration, some are coming for update of information, some are coming for replacement, a lot have lost their cards.
She also said some are coming for sim validations as most of them come back to them when they go to the Telcos and their sim card merger process fails.
“It is not everybody at the office who is coming to do new registration.”
When asked why some offices are able to register just eight people in a day, as complained by someone who phoned in, Dora Badu explained that only four persons were deployed at their regional and district offices and they were the same people doing registration and issuing cards with the same machine and therefore could not register a lot of people.
She added that because of multitasking, the four could attend to 50 persons in a day with different issues.
She also said human factor was also a cause of the delayance in the registration, explaining that people sometimes get there and they forget their details and they have to call their family members to get it.
Meanwhile, she said the number of officers have been increased to eight to enable a faster registration and issuance of cards.
Ghana| Atinkaonline.com| Porcia Oforiwaa Ofori
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