No Stress for New SIM Re-Registration - Sam George assures Nation

In a move to overhaul Ghana’s digital security landscape, the Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, has declared that the upcoming SIM card registration exercise is a critical consumer protection initiative, distancing the project from past procurement controversies.

Speaking at a media stakeholder engagement on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, the Minister emphasized that the exercise is designed to rectify a broken system that has left innocent Ghanaians vulnerable to identity theft and wrongful arrests.

He revealed that the current SIM database is riddled with inaccuracies, leading to severe real-life consequences.

He cited instances where law enforcement agencies, acting on flawed data, apprehended the wrong individuals because their identities had been cloned.

“There have been instances where law enforcement, relying on the flawed data we have now, has apprehended the wrong person,” Sam George stated. “We’ve had cases where a person’s Ghana Card was cloned to register a SIM used in criminal activity, leading investigators to an innocent citizen.”

By integrating the new register directly with the National Identification Authority and the National Communications Authority, the government aims to create a single source of truth that links every SIM card to a verified biometric profile.

This latest directive follows a series of turbulent registration cycles over the last decade, including the 2011 launch which lacked biometric verification and the 2021/2022 re-registration which, while introducing a self-registration app, was plagued by technical glitches and long queues.

The Minister was quick to point out that unlike previous iterations, which were often criticized as being procurement-driven, this phase is about system integrity. He expressed confidence that if the nation gets this right, it will be the final SIM registration exercise ever required.

The new system will be jointly managed by the NCA and NIA to ensure that once a person’s Ghana Card is revoked or reported stolen, all linked SIM cards can be instantly flagged.

This real-time synchronization is expected to drastically reduce mobile money fraud, eliminate cloned identities, and restore public confidence in digital transactions and mobile communication.