SIM card re-registration should not have deadlines – Federation of Labour
The Ghana Federation of Labour (GFL) has called on the Ministry of Communication and Digitalisation to remove the deadline imposed on the re-registration of SIM cards.
Mr Abraham Koomson, the GFL Secretary-General, said the March 31 deadline for the public to register their SIM or risk losing their numbers was putting undue pressure on the people.
“The process has put unrestrained pressure on the public to join long queues for hours and even days amid struggles just to register their SIM cards ahead of the deadline, we must put human face to policies that affect the masses,” Mr Koomson told the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Tema.
“Solving a century problem needs time and patience to achieve good results, the deadline should not be there at all considering the stress people are going through. Let us make things flexible for our people.”
He said the situation was also exposing prospective registrants to the COVID-19 as well as affecting productivity.
Mr Koomson urged the telecos to send mobile registration teams to public and private organisations, educational institutions, markets and identifiable groups to undertake the process to ease the pressure on employees.
Another difficulty was the acquisition of the Ghana Card, he said, which was the primary identity for the SIM registration.
He called on the National Identification Authority to make it easy for citizens to acquire the Ghana card and release outstanding cards as quickly as possible to enable the people to register their SIM.
The Ministry launched the National SIM Card Registration Exercise in October, 2021, making it mandatory for every subscriber to register his or her SIM.
Under the exercise, only the Ghana Card was to be used for the exercise by citizens while a valid passport would be used by foreigners.
To register, subscribers would have to dial *404# and follow the prompt, a unique code would be generated, which should be presented to the telcos operator for the biometric data to be taken to complete the process.
Source: GNA