GHANA’S Public Affairs Director of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Bertha Dzeble, has justified the decision by the authority to begin another mass registration exercise in order to issue new national identity cards to Ghanaians.
According to him most institutions depend on data from the authority, hence the need to upgrade their system to meet international standards.
She noted that during the first nationwide registration exercise, only four fingerprints were captured but “now, the International Civil Aviation Authority decides that all [biometric] ID cards must have all 10 fingerprints and indeed institutions that are to use our database have all gone ahead to use the 10 fingerprints already. We need to be at that standard because it’s our database that all others will use.”
Her defence follow reports that the NIA is scheduled to undertake a fresh registration of all Ghanaians under an “expanded registration project” with a $115 million loan facility from the Exim Bank.
This decision comes six years after the authority began a mass registration exercise, completing it in seven regions and parts of the three northern regions; and card distribution exercises in parts of the Greater Accra Region.
So far, Ghana has spent about GHC21,621,075 on the mass registration and card distribution exercises.
Bertha Dzeble explained that the Authority needed to undertake the upgrade because the previous one delayed data processing saying, “the [new] facility allows us to issue the cards instantly.”
She disclosed that Ghana secured the loan indirectly from Exim Bank per the arrangement with the company involved.
“We sent out an expression of interest for companies to help us to upgrade our system and any company that is providing that technology and equipment must come with funding for us to do it. NIA has not gone directly to Exim bank to take that loan, but the company that won the bid is the one that is taking that loan on behalf of NIA and we hope to pay back that loan from revenue we will get when we have this system complete,” she said.
The new card has a 128 kilobyte storage capacity and will enable all dependent “institutions to build their data directly and manage the card”, Dzeble stated.
African Eye News
