Former President John Dramani Mahama has stated that he suffered a raft of punitive measures being rolled out by the National Communication Authority (NCA) at the behest of the Communications Ministry against persons who have not reregistered their SIM cards.
According to him, his SIM card was blocked consequently preventing him from making a phone call over a period of two days.
He said this was in spite of the fact that he together with members of his staff had reregistered their SIM cards as the directive from the National Communications Authority, NCA, to the telcos had said.
In an interview granted to Accra-based TV3, Mahama said it was problematic for NCA and other regulatory bodies to implement punitive measures against persons who through no fault of theirs have been unable to register their SIM cards.
“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.
“And 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. They have turned it 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 NCA announced a set of punitive measures against persons who have not reregistered their SIM cards this month.
Some of these measures include barring of calls, expensive use of data services and all outgoing calls re-routed to an interactive voice recording (IVR) for a SIM registration sensitisation message to be played before all calls are connected.
The measure that is most biting hard is the barring of outgoing calls which has compelled some SIM card subscribers to throng various registration centres in a last-minute attempt to have their SIMs registered.
Subscribers have until September 30 to reregister their SIM cards or face deactivation from all services.
