Ghana Card: NIA pledges to clear backlog before banking transactions deadline

In less than two weeks, banks and financial institutions will require just the Ghana card as the sole identification document to allow for financial transactions to be made.

But until now, over 300,000 Ghanaians are unable to access their Ghana cards from the National Identification Authority (NIA) months and years after applying for them.

The NIA however, says it is working hard to clear its backlog before the stated deadline, which is the 1st of July.

Head of Corporate Affairs at the NIA, Dr. Abdul Ganiyu said, “We have registered about 16.8 million people now and we have printed about 16.5 million cards. In that respect, you can see a shortfall of about 300,000 so it’s very much possible that most of the people complaining now are within the 300,000 backlog.”

“It’s a significant number so, in the next couple of days, we will try to print these cards and announce this to the general public, so they can go to where they registered to pick up their cards. Much of that problem should be dealt with by July 1,” he noted on the Citi Breakfast Show on Tuesday.

Customers of banks and other financial institutions that are yet to update their records with the Ghana Card have less than 10 days to do so, or risk not being able to engage in any financial transaction through their accounts.

The Bank of Ghana had earlier explained that the National Identification Authority verification transaction platform will be integrated into its financial monitoring platform to ensure that all financial transactions performed within the ecosystem are linked to one identity and information to facilitate the identification of beneficiaries for track and trace purposes.

All this is being done as part of the government’s efforts to ensure that the National Identification card is used as the sole identification document for every transaction performed in the country.

However, it is unfortunate that over 300,000 Ghanaians who have registered for Ghana have not been able to receive their cards from the National Identification Authority, and this has come as a great concern to many as the July 1st deadline draws near.

SIM card re-registration

While some are yet to receive their cards, others are lamenting the inability of their telecommunication network companies to validate their SIM cards with the Ghana Card.

Dr. Abdul Ganiyu attributed the problem to technical issues which the telcos themselves have to resolve.

“The validation of the Ghana Card is a technical problem that had to be dealt with by the telcos. This is because anytime people have come to the NIA with that complaint, we have been able to validate the card, and we find that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the card. Where we have established that there’s no data on the card, we go through the process of printing a new card for those people.”

“But most of the time, when people come around, we are able to validate the card and indeed, when they go back to the internet service provider, they are not able to validate it so much of the problem has to do with the telecommunication service provider.”