Minister for Communication, Digital Technology, and Innovation, Sam George, has harshly criticized the previous Akufo-Addo administration’s SIM card registration initiative, describing it as an “abysmal failure.”
Speaking on Citi FM’s Eyewitness News on Wednesday, April 9, 2025, Sam George pointed to major flaws in the process, particularly the absence of proper verification measures, which he said has hindered efforts to accurately link SIM cards to individuals.
“The attempts at SIM re-registration was an abysmal failure. Currently, if you were to do a deep dive, and there have been several instances where, for security reasons, we tried to identify individuals on the back of their SIM and the registration that was used, and you would realise that there was no proper verification done,” he stated.
He added that the previous administration ignored concerns about the weak technological framework underpinning the exercise, as well as the inconvenience caused to Ghanaians.
“We had many of these back and forth when the previous administration tried to do a SIM registration, we made the point that there was no technological base for what they were doing. And that they were subjecting Ghanaians to unnecessary discomfort, long queues that were not necessary, but it fell on deaf ears.”
Sam George said the result has been an uptick in SIM-related fraud, with the country back to “square one” in terms of having a credible database of users.
“We’re back to square one, because today, we can’t identify who has a SIM. SIM-related fraud has increased in the same SIM registration exercise. We purposed to do this as one final one, clean one, backed by technology and extremely human-centered. For us, that is the focus,” he said.
The minister on April 8 announced that a new SIM card re-registration exercise will begin in June 2025.
This will feature a fully online, technology-driven system designed to eliminate the long queues and inefficiencies that plagued the previous effort.
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