Minister of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George has debunked claims that a contract has been awarded to third-party service provider for the upcoming SIM Registration exercise.
Months ago, Honorary Vice President of IMANI Africa, Bright Simons alleged that the Minister had single-handed awarded a contract to a certain Transactly to be the third-party service provider for the National Communications Authority (NCA) in the upcoming SIM Registration exercise.
He cited reliable sources at the Ministry of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations.
The Minister challenged Simons then to “publish just one page of that contract” and he will resign. But till today Simons has not put out any evidence to back his claim.
Speaking at a media engagement on the upcoming SIM Registration, Sam George stated that indeed, a third-party service provider will be contracted to work with the telcos to build the platform that will be used for the self-service registration, but that platform will be owned by the NCA, and every data they will collect will sit directly with the NCA.
He however noted that the procurement process for that entity has only just started, saying that the ministry first had to write to the finance ministry for clearance and then write to the Public Procurement Authority to start the process.
The minister said the process is still in the works and no one entity has been named yet, so, it could never be true that he had handpicked a company called Transactly and handed them to job.
Indeed, Techfocus24 learnt from a very reliable source that there is no company called Transactly among the companies which have showed interest in partnering with the NCA for the process.
It would be recalled that in the previous process, Kelni GVG was the NCA’s third-party partner in the collection of the biodata that became the Central SIM Register, which the minister said had some breaches, for which this current process has to be done.
The Kelni GVG’s contract, which was on a revenue share basis, came under heavy criticism as a needless venture, which only duplicated what NIA (National Identification Authority) had already done, and also created a needless frustration for Ghanaians who had to join long queues on the scotching sun for their biometrics to be taken just to meet a deadline to SIM deactivation.
This time round, Sam George said that all validly registered SIM cards have no deadlines for regularization, adding that the process will cost individual Ghanaians and the state absolutely nothing.
He explained that the telcos will pay for the entire process and the third-party contractor as well as NIA will be paid from what the telcos will pay.
“It will be a purely B2B (business to business) arrangement between the telcos and the third-party contractor with the Ghanaian taxpayer bearing absolutely zero cost,” he said.
He said currently, the stakeholders are still deliberating on what the actual cost per the registration of one SIM card should be, adding that whereas government has idea what the cost should be based on some models it worked with, the telcos have raised some concerns, which are being addressed before the final cost in agreed on.
“Because this is being done with a consultative approach we are still discussing all the issues related to cost before we put any numbers out,” he said.
The other cost fact will be cost related to public education and sensitization, which will be done by the NCA and therefore the cost related to that will be borne by the NCA, the minister said.
