With just day more to the deadline for the SIM card re-registration exercise, Ghanaians who have still not registered their cards are being asked to do so within the shortest possible time.

After several postponements of the deadline for the exercise, the government announced the final extension of the deadline to today, September 30, after which all SIM cards which have not been re-registered will be blocked.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Dr. Ken Ashigbey, speaking to Citi Business News on the sidelines of a mobile consumer engagement forum said it’s not too late to still register the cards.

” What happens is that when you get close to when the timeline is expiring, you find a lot of people moving to go and register. When the blocking happened, people moved in, but now, the numbers have gone down. Even when we’ve brought the service close to people, they’re not long queues here. So, we haven’t gotten the numbers that we wanted.”

” But I would urge everyone to just walk to a nearby telecommunication office to register their SIM before the deadline,” he said.

Dr. Ashigbey however noted that the National Communications Authority and other stakeholders will take into consideration Ghanaians who have still not acquired their Ghana cards and hence have not been able to re-register their SIM cards before proceeding to block the unregistered numbers after the deadline.

” The challenge has been the fact that people still don’t have their Ghana cards. So there needs to be a bit more collaboration between the NCA and NIA to ensure that everyone has their card. But then also, there are people who have the cards but are not registering. What should we do so that such people too can register? These are the things that the Ministry of Communication will take into consideration before the next directive is issued.”

The mobile consumer engagement which took place at Tema formed part of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunication’s 10th anniversary celebrations.

Dr. Ashigbey explained to Citi Business News that his outfit decided to “engage subscribers where they are located, provide them a platform to do their SIM card re-registration, educate them on some of the challenges that they face in the telecom space and give them the chance to get responses to questions that they would ask.”

The Telcos Chamber CEO further assured that his outfit and other stakeholders keep intensifying efforts to track down fraudsters. He reiterated the need for subscribers to remain vigilant in order not to fall prey to these fraudsters.

Source: Ellen Dapaah (CitiBusinessNews)