The deadline for the sim card re-registration exercise has been extended to September 30, 2022, following public outcry.
The deadline for the sim card re-registration should have ended yesterday, July 31, 2022, but due to the delay in the issuance of the Ghana card which is linked to the sim card registration exercise, many Ghanaians including Civil Society called for further extension while others proposed the end of 2022 as the deadline.
However, at a press conference in Accra yesterday, the Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu Ekuful announced the good news.
She said, “Upon consultation with the industry and in view of the challenges enumerated above, I have very reluctantly decided to grant a conditional extension. The programme will be extended to 30th September to end on the anniversary of its commencement.”
“That will give us one full year of SIM registration. It will be reviewed at the end of this month and any SIM that has not been fully registered by the end of August will be barred from receiving certain services including voice and data services,” she said.
“The statistics indicate that there was a 90% drop in SIM reregistration, as soon as the first deadline was extended on 21st March. Until a week ago there were no queues, people started going to register when they realised that the deadline was imminent after going to sleep.”
Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful added, “The mobile network operators, NCA, and the NIA have all engaged additional staff, procured the necessary logistics, and are incurring significant expenses to conduct this exercise successfully, any extension of the process increases their cost.”
In a related development, the Minister for Communications disclosed that a self-service sim reregistration app will be launched tomorrow.
The app will help Ghanaians re-register their sim cards in the comfort of their homes without going to centers of operators as is the case currently.
The app will be available for download on both android and IOS after the launch.
The registration via the app will cost GH¢5 .
