The Minister of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, has announced that the government will commence a fresh nationwide SIM registration exercise by the first quarter of 2026, describing the previous process carried out under the former administration as invalid.
Speaking in an interview on TV3 on Wednesday, December 3, the Minister said the earlier exercise led by former Communications Minister Ursula Owusu-Ekuful under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government failed to meet fundamental technical and legal requirements.
He argued that the previous registration failed to properly validate subscriber information through biometric verification, a key step required to ensure that the identity of each mobile user is accurately authenticated.
“The registrations that were purported to have been done by Ursula Owusu and the NPP did not cross reference the biometric they took from you against that database. Nothing of that sort was done,” he said.
Mr George explained that a new Legislative Instrument (L.I.) to guide the upcoming registration has been completed and will soon be laid before Parliament for approval. He stressed that the legal framework must be firmly established before the rollout begins.
“The L.I is ready and again I am meticulous about what I am doing. First quarter next year, we will run it out. We are currently at the Public Procurement Authority doing the procurement of the service provider to do the SIM registration,” he stated. “We have drafted the L.I and it will be laid before Parliament because again there must be a proper legal basis for what we are doing.”
The Minister was emphatic that the new process should not be seen as a continuation of the previous exercise. “We are not doing a re-registration. We are doing a SIM registration. You didn’t do any registration, the former Minister just wasted everybody’s time,” he added.
Mr George revealed that his Ministry has reached an agreement with the National Identification Authority (NIA) to integrate biometric databases, enabling seamless verification during the registration process. This, he emphasised, will ensure that subscribers’ biometric details correspond accurately with the Ghana Card data.
“So, now we have sat down with the Interior Minister and his head of agency, Yayra Koku at NIA. We have worked out the integration between the Telco, the regulator, NCA and the NIA,” he said.
He further disclosed that the Ministry has already begun cleaning and synchronising biometric data previously collected during the NPP-era exercise. “All the biometrics they collected, it was just sitting in databases scattered all over the place. We have picked those databases and we are now cleaning them up and cross referencing them with the NIA in the backend. About 80 per cent of them have been done,” he noted.
