Telecom and mobile money wallet operators in the country are worried that the scheduled mass deactivation of SIM cards on Monday, April 17, as directed by the National Communications Authority (NCA) will lead to a forced-churn of millions of mobile money wallets unjustifiably.
According to them, the directive contravenes the dormancy provisions in Section 33 of the Payment Systems & Services Act 2019, ACT 987, which requires a 2-year dormancy for inactive mobile money accounts to be churned.
They therefore want the Bank of Ghana, under whose purview ACT 987 exists to intervene and ensure that provisions of the Act are upheld.
In a letter dated April 13, 2023, the NCA directed the telcos and ISPs to do three main things:
1. Delink all SIMs that have been disconnected in compliance with NCA’s 31st March, 2023 deadline from their SIM registration databases and same should reflect in the Central SIM Register by Monday, 17th April 2023. These should include SIMs that remain blocked in compliance with the Hon. Minister’s directive on 30th November 2022.
2. Indicate in writing to the NCA, by Tuesday, 18th April 2023, the total number of SIMs disconnected as per directive one above.
3. Delink, deactivate and remove all SIMs registered after the limit of ten (10) from their SIM Registration databases and same should reflect in the Central SIM Register by Monday, 17th April 2023.
Techfocus24 gathered that following the directive, the operators have reached out to NCA to try and discuss the dire implications of the directive on businesses and individuals, but the NCA is bent on dealing with the ongoing fraudulent SIM registration drastically so it is not budging on the directive.
Again, Techfocus24 is reliably informed that the Bank of Ghana (BoG) was not consulted on the potential impact of directive on mobile money. Indeed, the NCA and BoG are said to be very territorial and therefore do not really have a good working relationship where collaborative regulation of the industry is concerned.
Techfocus24 has since reached out to Bank of Ghana to know their take on the NCA’s directive and it’s impact on mobile money wallets, but the central bank is yet to respond to our request.
Is Mass Deactivation a fix?
Meanwhile, questions have been asked as to whether this mass SIM deactivation will solve the fraudulent SIM registration, which is enabled by the failings of the NCA itself.
The entire problem of people unaware that their Ghana Card had been used to register multiple SIMs is because the NCA SIM registration platform does not have a verification component. The data collected by the NCA is incompatible with the National Identification Authority’s database and therefore cannot be used for verification purposes.
While the NCA is aware of this, they themselves do not have a verification platform to be able to flag any fraudulent SIM registrations when it is being done or even after it has been done.
The only way by which NCA can tell that a particular SIM was registered fraudulently is when the owner of the Ghana Card linked to that SIM makes a complaint. So, if the Ghana Card owner does not get to know of the fraud it will never be found out.
NCA has therefore promised to release a universal short code for Ghanaians to be able to check regularly and know how many SIM cards are linked to their cards, something that should have been put in place from the onset as a preventive measure or as a quick remedy measure.
Extra bio data for what?
The other big question that still remains unanswered is since NCA is NOT verifying the second set of Biodata it is collecting against the NIA’s database, what are they storing that Biodata on KelniGVG’s common platform at NITA for, and what purpose is that Biodata serving Ghana in respect of the ongoing SIM registration?
The fact is that the second set of Biodata being collected by NCA is not playing any role whatsoever, in the new SIM register being compiled. So, the stage two of the SIM registration is completely unnecessary. This means that SIM cards and their corresponding mobile money wallets, which have gone through stage one of the process (linking to Ghana Card) are valid and should not be deactivated.
This is a matter that National Security should be interested in. Banks, SSNIT and several other state and private institutions are verifying IDs and bio data against the NIA’s database. Even EC wants to do same. It is only NCA that is doing otherwise, as if NCA is building another national ID database outside of the NIA’s database and everyone is watching them.
