Former President John Dramani Mahama has said that he suffered consequences of punitive actions rolled out by the National Communication Authority (NCA) early this month.
According to him, his Sim card got blocked regardless of undertaking the re-registration process with his team.
He disclosed that his Sim was blocked for 2 days but 'they have it turned it back on.'
“And I must say I suffered a bit of that experience with the call barring. On one of my phones, my outgoing calls were not going through. My SIM was blocked for two days.
They have turned it back on. We went through the process of registering. They said it wasn’t registered properly.
That’s the kind of information I got, we didn’t complete the exercise and yet they came here and sat with us and did SIM registration here and we called them to my office and so all my staff and everybody went through the registration but most of my staff found their calls blocked,” Mahama said.
The National Communications Authority (NCA) this month, directed Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to start implementing "punitive measures" against persons who have not re-registered their Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards.
The move took from Monday, September 5, 2022.
According to a statement signed by the Authority’s Director-General, outgoing calls and data services for a sequential batch of numbers will be blocked for 2 days weekly on a rotational basis.
This Mahama said was problematic for NCA and other regulatory bodies to implement punitive measures against persons who through no fault of theirs have been unable to register their SIM cards.
“The SIM registration, you can even start with new SIM cards and say that 'No Ghana Card, No SIM card' if you are purchasing. So we can start at that point while we mop up the others in the system. But if you say by September 30th, everybody must have it or else we will take punitive actions against you…your data will be more expensive, we will block your outgoing calls and so on and so forth, that’s a major problem." he added.
Meanwhile, the NCA has withdrawn its earlier directive to telecommunication companies to bar calls from customers who have not registered their SIM cards yet.
Following the new directive by the regulator, NCA, the telcos have now stopped barring calls by their subscribers who are yet to complete their SIM card registration.