NDC Faithfuls Laud Mahama For Clarifying Issues On NIA And Ghana Card

"Thank you President John Dramani Mahama

for clarifying this Some of us are willing to debate anyone, including Attafuah, about who brought in the new NIA System with documents and email exchanges with Margins and Dermalog, the private partners.

"We are happy that President Mahama clarified the issue yesterday at the New Year School at UG Legon," the NDC faithfuls led by the Deputy Communication Officer of the North Tongu Constituency, Mr Wisdom Wilson Adzedakor noted.

Below is the comments made by Nahama

I would like to clarify that before we left office, we had gone very far in the rollout of a National Identification System and the Ghana card. 

We had passed Legislation in the form of LI 2111 that made the Ghana Card the only acceptable form of identification for any transaction or activity that required identification.

We achieved Factory Acceptance for the system used for the capture and printing of cards as of December 2016, and it is this system that made it possible for the very first Ghana card to be printed and issued to President Akufo-Addo in September 2017. What our government sought to avoid was the perennial mistake of not issuing Ghana cards immediately after registering at the registration centres.

Unfortunately, this government has repeated the mistakes of previous governments and has been grappling with un-issued and unclaimed cards. Before 2017, the National Identification Authority had:

1. Collected data from 16 million people.

2. Loaded 9 million of these records into the NIA database.

3. Processed close to 5 million of the loaded records and assigned them unique personal

identification numbers.

4. Personalised 2.2 million cards out of the number processed.

5. Distributed 900,000 personalised cards with another 12 million blank cards in stock and

6. Began registering foreigners.

Ladies and gentlemen, any subsequent work done on the National ID system is merely a continuation of this work, just as we continued work started by the Kufour Administration, which set up the National Identification Authority. 

This background should, therefore, put to rest any genuine doubt about the NDC’s ability to take technology to the next level and make life much easier for all Ghanaians.