NIA registers 7.091 million Ghanaians for Ghana Card
The National Identification Authority (NIA) has explained that it has been able to register and issue Ghana Cards to a total of 7,091,769 Ghanaians within one year that it started the mass registration exercise.
The NIA started the mass registration exercise on April 29, 2019 and had planned to complete it by June 2020 but the exercise had to be truncated on March 20, 2020 due to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic.
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In a press statement issued Friday, Nay 15, 2020, the NIA said apart from the 7,091,769 registered and issued with cards, a total of 127,723 are in various stages of adjudication.
"NIA has printed the majority of cards in backlog (3,683,955), and is ready to issue them to Ghanaians once NIA resumes its field operations.
The NIA's press statement issued by Head of Corporate Affairs, Mr Francis Palmdetti, was in response to allegations by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) that the NIA was working with the Electoral Commission to rig the 2020 polls in favour of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
- Related:
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- NPP, NDC haggle over electoral roll
- We are not conspiring with EC to rig 2020 polls – NIA to NDC
The NDC had claimed that the instant issuance of cards by the NIA had failed.
But responding, the NIA said the instant issuance strategy was an innovation introduced to address its perennial inability to issue printed cards over the years.
"Network connectivity permitting, instant printing is the preferred mode of card printing, followed by the second option of deferred printing, and lastly centralized printing," it noted.
It said nationwide, over 70 per cent of all cards are issued instantly, and that when it got to the turn of the Volta Region, the experience was the "best."
"It is noteworthy that, between 2008 and 2016, NIA issued only 900,000 Ghana Cards," it added
Backlog
Earlier in a radio interview on Accra based Oman FM's Boiling Point programme monitored by Graphic Online on Thursday night [May 14, 2020], the Chief Executive Officer of the NIA, Prof Ken Attafuah said many of the backlog cards have been printed and that there were just around 100,000 cards that were yet to be printed.
He said when the opportunity presents itself, those cards were ready and the NIA will send them to the field and issue it to the public.
He said NIA will embark on a mop-up in Greater Accra and five other regions, where the registration figures were not encouraging especially in Upper West, Upper East, Bono East, Bono and Ahafo.
He said after the mop-up, the NIA will open permanent regional and district offices across the country to also issue Ghana Cards so that every Ghanaian can get a Ghana Card.
Adjudication
Apart from the backlog, Prof Attafuah said there were about half a million applications that are in various stages of adjudication because some of the applicants used different names the first time they registered when the NIA started the Ghana Card during President J.A. Kufuor's or President J.E.A. Mills' tenure.
Some too, he said have registered with different dates of birth and have not shown gazette notifications indicating the change in either name or date of birth.
He said the system had detected all those anomalies because some people may have changed their information in the present registration exercise because of reasons in relation with their social security or retirement dates, but, he said because the system was very sensitive, all those anomalies have been flagged and currently being adjudicated.
He said those cases are in a separate queue and that there were about half a million of those cases that were being adjudicated by the NIA.
Attached below is the NIA's full response to the NDC allegations
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