Parliament on Thursday 31st May,2018 approved the implementation of the KelniGVG deal with Ministry of Communication and Finance to BUILD ,OPERATE,MANAGE AND TRANSFER (BOMT) a common platform.
It ordered the compliance of the telecoms by June 11 to connect to the platform for Revenue generation, Mobile Money ,Fraud detection as well as
Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful rejected accusations of baseless corruption and underhand dealings in the award of the revenue assurance monitoring contract to Kelni-GVG.
In a statement to Parliament, Ursula Owusu indicated that the 89 million dollar contract is the best deal the country can get for the kind of service needed.
She further stated that the country would own all the equipment for the execution of the contract after five years.
“This issue has, rather, unfortunately, generated some apprehension which in my view, is unnecessary…Inevitably, the monthly traffic data collated by the NCA and the network operators for free was substantially the same data presented by Subah and Afriwave for which the latter companies were paying 2.6 dollars per month. Mr Speaker, we were paying for no work done. This was the situation the NPP government inherited, and it clearly could not continue.”
“Mr Speaker, the fee for this transaction, $1.49 million per month, (as against the $2.6 million paid monthly to both Subah and Afriwave) is within the industry average for Platform as a Service (PaaS) contracts of this nature. The vendors have already procured and delivered equipment worth over $50m as part of the contract sum, at no extra cost to the state and this represents significant cost savings to the nation,” the Minister added.
She also stated that all the telecom operators resisting the implementation of the new monitoring law in Ghana have, without question, accepted and are complying with the same monitoring regime in Uganda and Rwanda and wondered why they are dragging their feet here in Ghana.
Except for Glo, Ursula Owusu Ekuful said all the networks have refused to comply with the law, insisting, the government will not renege on its responsibility to ensure they do.
KelniGVG have so far completed high-level design for MTN, Airtel-Tigo, Glo and Vodafone , Procured and delivered to the premises of NCA servers and racks to be installed at operator data centers and also Completed installation of Network Operating Centre (NOC) on Fourth (4th) Floor of the NCA Tower. This stage of works covers civil works, air conditioning, fire protection, clean power, monitoring screens, set up of work stations for agents, racks and servers for data aggregation and analysis, furnishings, etc.
Installation of GSM Gateways for antifraud management on international inbound traffic, and daily test calls and reports presented to NCA have also been completed.
It also records that the Implemented system to analyze and report on monthly CDRs for NCA has been in place since March 2018.
