President John Dramani Mahama has added his voice to the upcoming SIM registration exercise, describing the previous registration as wasteful.
According to President Mahama, there was a conflict between former Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful and the former head of the National Identification Authority (NIA), which caused the challenges in the last SIM registration exercise.
President Mahama, addressing a gathering on Thursday, March 19, 2026, stated, “Some time back, we were told to register our SIM cards, which caused great distress to Ghanaians. Even MTN had to mount canopies just to attend to everyone.”
“When that was ongoing, we didn’t know that the former Minister of Communications [Ursula Owusu] was not on speaking terms with the former head of the NIA. They had issues between them,” he disclosed.
President Mahama added, “When you are undertaking a SIM registration, it is important to add it to the national registration so that a number can easily be identified and traced to the owner should that person be engaged in wrongdoing”.
“The sad part is that we didn’t do that, making the previous SIM registration exercise wasteful,” the president stated.
President Mahama further disclosed, “The new one that the Minister of Communications is about to do, the SIM will be linked to the Ghana Card, which will make it impossible to change it. Everything involving that particular SIM card will easily be traced to its owner,” he explained.
“We will do it in such a way that you will receive a code on your phone, which will demand you to write your name, Ghana card number and other details, which will directly go into the database and will directly link your SIM card to the Ghana Card. You will not need to visit or go all the way to the telcos just to register the SIM,” he noted.
“The process will be free, and it is the telcos that will bear the cost for the re-registration. All you need to do is to input your details when you receive the code,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sam Nartey George, the Minister for Communication, Innovations, and Digital Technologies, has announced that the upcoming SIM registration will be Ghana’s first with a proper biometric registration.
According to Sam George, the new SIM registration is intended to correct flaws from the old registration.
The sector minister is quoted by a GHOne news flyer to have said, “This will be the first time in Ghana’s history that we will have a proper biometric SIM registration”.
Sam George further assured Ghanaians that the upcoming SIM registration exercise will be the last.
According to him, the government rolls out a robust, technology-driven system designed to enhance convenience and eliminate fraud.
Speaking to stakeholders about the planned exercise, Sam George stated, “The fact that you have multi-agency collaboration on this is something that you didn’t see in previous times.
You have the NIA (National Identification Authority) being our single source of truth when it comes to IDs, the NCA (National Communications Authority), the ministry, Immigration Service, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and other agencies all working together.
“What you see today is the product of very hard and difficult conversations, and that gives me the confidence that if we execute this right, this will be the final SIM registration exercise,” Mr George explained.
“This registration is 75 per cent communication and 25 per cent technology,” he said
He further ruled out automatic migration of existing SIM data into the new system saying, “You are not cleaning up. You are actually migrating the viruses.
You have infected files, and you are migrating them onto a new system.
You are basically replicating the problems of the old system.
And that’s part of the reason why we can’t do a wholesale migration. And that’s cured today by NIA’s solution that they are offering to us based on the collaboration we are having with them,” he said.
Watch the video below:
“Data from the former sim registration process was not made available to the National Identification Authority’s systems because the Communications minister at the time and NIA Boss were not on good terms”
— SIKAOFFICIAL🦍 (@SIKAOFFICIAL1) March 19, 2026
—President John Dramani Mahama reveals during his Resetting Ghana Tour in… pic.twitter.com/iJJFQcshol