Former President John Dramani Mahama has revealed that his mobile SIM card was blocked for two days despite the fact that he had re-registered it with his Ghana card as the NCA required.
Speaking during an interview with TV3, the former President said that action showed the problems fraught with the decisions of the National Communications Authority (NCA) and the Communications Ministry regarding this SIM card re-registration exercise they’re currently undertaking.
“…I must say I suffered a bit of that experience with the call barring. On one of my phones, my outgoing calls were not going through. My SIM was blocked for two days…” Mahama said.
The former President revealed that although he had registered, he was later informed the registration was not properly done even though the Telco representatives had visited his office to carry out the exercise themselves.
“They have turned it [the SIM] back on. We went through the process of registering. They said it wasn’t registered properly. That’s the kind of information I got, we didn’t complete the exercise and yet they came here and sat with us and did SIM registration here and we called them to my office and so all my staff and everybody went through the registration but most of my staff found their calls blocked,” Mahama said.
The National Democratic Congress leader suggested that what government and the NCA should have done was announce that any newly purchased SIM was to be registered with a Ghana card whilst they onboard all existing users onto the database.
“The SIM registration, you can even start with new SIM cards and say that ‘No Ghana Card, No SIM card’ if you are purchasing. So we can start at that point while we mop up the others in the system. But if you say by September 30th, everybody must have it or else we will take punitive actions against you…your data will be more expensive, we will block your outgoing calls and so on and so forth, that’s a major problem.,” Mahama said.
The former President’s comments come after the telecommunications networks (telcos) implemented punitive measures against Ghanaians yet to register their sim cards with their Ghana cards on the direction of the National Communications Authority (NCA).
Meanwhile, latest reports reveal the exercise has been suspended following intense public backlash over barring the SIM cards of registered Ghanaians like Mr Mahama.
At the moment, the September 30th deadline to register or be blocked remains in place.
Source: theGhanaianVoice.Com
