Ghanaians to re-register SIM cards in June or risk losing phone numbers - Bawumia

The re-registration forms part of measures to help in the formalisation of the economy.

According to him, the Minister for Communication and Digitalization will announce the procedure and formalities to embark on the re-registration exercise.

He made this during a speech at the 5th CEO Summit in Accra.

He noted that the SIM registration exercise is aimed at helping curb activities such as SIM box and momo fraud.

"I expect that the minister for communication and Digitalization will soon announce that we will all from the end of June or maybe beginning of July this year everybody will have to register their sim with a national ID otherwise we lose that sim.

"This will give us identity for a real MoMo transaction then take away issues of Fraud from Sim box or through MoMo so we can discard all of that," he said.

The government's decision to formalise the Ghanaian economy has made it necessary for the various identity cards to be brought under one umbrella.

A six months grace period has been earmarked to get all Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) numbers re-registered with the Ghana Card.

The exercise is to add to the country's central database with our unique IDs.

in 2019, the government announced that all SIM cards must be re-registered but the Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr described it as "useless".

He said the exercise will be 'fruitless' and 'useless' unless the right measures are put in place.

Kwesi Pratt said even though he has never been against the registration of SIM cards, it will be useless if the country keeps spending the taxpayers' money on the exercise only for it to be repeated.

He said he was in a queue for 5-6 hours to re-register some years ago.

Speaking on Accra-based Peace FM, the veteran journalist said: "the system has failed, a complete failure."