As announced by the National Identification Authority (NIA), beginning today, October 25 to Tuesday, November 2, 2021, all 34 NIA registration centres located a the Ghana Revenue Authority, the Registrar General’s Department and the NIA head office will no longer be operational.
Ongoing registration exercise for the Ghana Card is temporarily suspended for the period.
In a statement issued in Accra by the Client Service Unit of the NIA, the suspension of the Ghana Card registration process and other services of the NIA had become necessary to allow for the deployment of its staff to its permanent offices nationwide.
This will enable the authority to bring its services, which include new registrations, card collection or issuance, card replacement, and update of personal records to the doorstep of Ghanaians.
On completion of the process, all 16 regional offices, 275 NIA operational district offices and the Premium Registration Centre at its Head Office would be opened across the country, effective Wednesday, November 3, 2021.
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Reason for the suspension of Ghana Card Registration
The Ghana Card registration process over the past few weeks has been characterized by challenges particularly long queues. In a radio discussion monitored by Ghana Talks Business, Mr. Abdul-Ganiyu, the Head of Department, Corporate Affairs at the NIA, the long queues stem from the reregistration of SIM cards which requires the use of the Ghana Card.
“Everyone uses a sim card. So you now have that population who have not yet registered going out, and these are the long queues that we are currently observing at registration centres.”
Following this development, Mr Abdul-Ganiyu said, in order for the NIA to curb this challenge of long queues, they need to operate an office in all districts in the county. Hence the suspension of the process to aid decentralisation of the Authority’s services.
“As an institution, that has been created, established for purposes of identity management, we should become a fully-fledged national institution where we have presence across all regions and across all districts of our country. So that people do not have to hustle in terms of going out to register. So we’re looking forward to doing that by end of October when all the district and regional offices would have been established,” Mr. Abudu Abdul-Ganiyu explained.
“All other persons who have registered over the period, and have still not gotten their card, would have to wait until the regional and district offices are operational, then we’d be able to issue. We are looking at it towards the end of October. So early November, all the offices should have been opened. We’re talking about 275 of them, in addition to 16 regional offices. If you happen to have registered in a particular district, that is where we would take your cards to,” Mr. Abudu Abdul-Ganiyu further explained.
