Ghana Card Failure: Sabotage Not An Impossibility – NIA Boss

The CEO of the National Identification Authority (NIA) Professor Ken Attafuah is suggesting the Authority’s failure to meet the timelines for beginning registrations and issuance of the much talked about Ghana Card could be as a result of sabotage.

Despite stating that he is not a conspiracy theorist so as to raise the specter of suspicion, he just could not shy away from it.

“It’s not an impossibility,” he stated on Monday, adding “that people might or someone might just want to do something funny.”

“We dotted our Is and crossed our Ts to make sure that things will work well and for some inexplicable reason we have been disappointed,” he stressed on Accra-based Joy FM.

His comments come after hundreds of officers who gathered at selected centres to get their National ID Card also known as Ghana Card were left stranded and disappointed after officers of the NIA failed to turn up for the registration exercise.

The exercise was scheduled to kick off at 7:00 am at some key state agencies and institutions like Jubilee House, Parliament, Judicial Service and the various security bodies.

Officers who had massed up had to disperse and return to their base as officials of NIA failed to show up for the much-touted project to take off.



Apology

The NIA in a statement also suggested that its system suffered a “technical hitch” affecting the Authority’s ability to commence the rollout of the Ghana card as scheduled.
It has, therefore “unreservedly” apologised to the personnel of the Jubilee House, Judicial Service, Ministry of Defence, National Security and the BNI for the inconvenience caused. The rest are; MOFARI (Research Dept), Ghana Police Service, Ghana Immigration Service, Ghana Prison Service and Ghana National Fire Service.

Its technical team, it assured “is working fervently to resolve the issue for registration to begin” suspending the registration until the problem is completely resolved.

Meanwhile, the former CEO of the Authority Dr. William Ahadzi is advising caution with the planned roll out of the National ID Card.

“I think it is a last minute hitch and my suspicion is that it may be a technical hitch,” the former NIA CEO stated on Starr Today Monday, May 28, 2018.

He continued: “If you are doing instant card issuance, you need to have your systems communicating live, in real time so that you don’t have people registering twice. So I think it is a technical hitch.”

The NIA must therefore proceed “cautiously,” he admonished.

The government of Ghana is contributing $531 million of the total $1.2 billion cost, while Identity Management System (IMS), which is partnering the NIA under a public/private partnership (PPP) agreement, will provide $678million for the exercise.

The issuance of a National Identification ID card is among the few key projects the government promised to execute to formalise the country’s economy.

Source:Starrfmonline.com