The National Identification Authority’s (NIA) Executive Secretary has provided an explanation for why his organization was unable to issue Ghana Cards for a while.
The NIA, according to Prof. Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, was experiencing financial difficulties.
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He claims that even if there are cards and skilled workers to continue the printing process, a private company involved in the deal is refusing to release the Ghana Cards to the NIA because it is owed a sizable sum of money.
He said in an interview on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday that “since about August of last year, we have experienced financial constraints in the system and it created a situation where even though we have 3.5 million stock of cards in a bonded warehouse, we are unable to assess the cards due to financial difficulty.”
Over 2.5 million cards still need to be printed.
According to Prof. Agyemang Attafuah, as of February 19th, the NIA had more than 17 million Ghana Card registrations. In addition, 541,521 cards have not yet been printed.
The outstanding cards will be printed in six months, according to Prof. Attafuah.
This, he claimed, is because the government cleared part of the bills on Friday; as a result, NIA is optimistic that “cards will be released into next week.”
In less than two weeks, he claimed, 541,521 cards could be printed when the cards were published.
In the meantime, the National Identification Authority (NIA) has been urged to get financial support to help with its job by a political scientist and fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD-Ghana).
Dr. John Osae-Kwapong notes that this is due to the Ghana Card’s significance as a legal instrument.
He claims that once the Authority has funding, they would be able to facilitate the registration of eligible voters for the Ghana Card.
When you eliminate that bottleneck, the Authority’s capacity to register people who present themselves should not necessarily pose an issue. “It looks like one of the major challenges that the NIA encountered, as he described it, was financial limits,” he added.
