Silence of Ursula and NCA is worrying – Selorm Branttie
Mr Selorm Branttie, vice president of IMANI Africa cannot understand the seeming silence of the Ministry of Communication and the National Communication Authority as the deadline for the Sim reregistration has elapsed.
Expressing his frustration during an interview on 30th September 2022 on TV3, he said “it is quite unfortunate that the Communication Ministry and the National Communication Authority who are the architects of the anxiety among Ghanaians due to this SIM card registration are silent.
Per his estimation of the registration progress so far, the 25 million thresholds have not been crossed by the telecommunications companies.
He also expressed worry that per the new modalities in place, if the sanctions for not re-registering your sim card should kick in, about 30 to 36 per cent of the SIM cards will be blocked.
Mr Branttie further critiqued stakeholders involved in the process saying “they have not been able to come out with the data analysis of the exercise so far a situation from them which is also worrying”.
The inefficiencies of the application provided for the registration were also blamed by Mr Selorm Branttie as he said “the app has just 100,000 downloads and it has not been stable in aiding the registration process”.
On what is likely to happen as the deadline of the Sim Card Registration has elapsed, Mr Branttie noted that it is within the ambit of the Communication Ministry and the National Communication Authority as they have the database of the Ghanaians who have registered and those who have not registered though he expects that there won’t be such a mix up again where people who had already registered will have their SIM cards blocked which would create a whole situation like what happened last month.
He further critiqued the application chosen by the ministry for the registration saying, “they chose the most tumultuous and difficult application to hold this as it has proven to be inefficient and the NCA with their expertise know they could have done better”.
Revealing the progress made so far regarding his lawsuit against the Communication Ministry, NCA and Attorney General he says “we are just around 2000 signatories consisting of people who have lots of issues regarding the process and the lack of proper consultations done by the stakeholders involved as even with the issue of mobile money alone which is not controlled by NCA but by the Bank of Ghana and other institutions so it makes it crazy that the NCA can take Ghanaians for a ride and that is why we are calling on more people to join the suit as we cannot allow the people in the executive to hold Ghanaians in such a way where cannot discharge things we do where we have the absolute right to do so”.
