Suhuyini questions interest of telcos in frustrating SIM card registration process

Member of Parliament (MP) for Tamale North, Alhassan Suhuyini, has questioned the interest of the telecommunications companies in deploying a few agents for the sim card registration process.

To him, with the number of agents deployed and the time frame for the registration process, there is no way targets set can be reached.

“That aside I’m skeptical of the approach mobile network operators are adopting which I fathom is meant to further frustrate the registration exercise."

He added that, “Since Oct to date, less than 2mil SIM cards have been successfully registered meanwhile it’s believed that there over 40mil active SIM cards currently. Mobile Network operators have deployed, only 3,242 agents across the country meanwhile SIM Reg Application, on average, takes 4 to 5 minutes. This means an agent dedicated only to the Registration/Re-registration for 8 hours a day can only take on average 90 Subscribers per day. Which is woefully inadequate to meet the target of over 40mil in the time frame given for the Registration exercise to end”.

Apart from the few agents for the registration process, he could not fathom why there is the insistence on the use of the Ghana Card for the registration process.

“What’s the motive of government to make the fairly new Ghana card which is less prevalent and hard to acquire the only document for registering SIM cards?”

Read his full post here.

My skepticism of this mandatory SIM card Registration is not about the idea of registering SIM cards but the fact that only the Ghana card is the qualifying document to have my SIM registered.

That aside I’m skeptical of the approach mobile network operators are adopting which I fathom is meant to further frustrate the registeration exercise.

Since Oct to date, less than 2mil SIM cards have been successfully registered meanwhile it’s believed that there over 40mil active SIM cards currently.

Mobile Network operators have deployed, only 3,242 agents across the country meanwhile SIM Reg Application, on the average, takes 4 to 5 minutes. This means an agent dedicated only to the Registration/Re-registration for 8 hours a day can only take on average 90 Subscribers per day. Which is woefully inadequate to meet the target of over 40mil in the time frame given for the Registeration exercise to end.

The Mobile Network Operators will therefore at least require to deploy about 100,000 agents to be able to capture all SIM cards within the time frame assuming every subscriber has a Ghana card.

Questions to ask therefore are;

What other interest is serving anyone to make the Ghana card the only document required to register a SIM card?

Why are the mobile network operators not deploying enough agents to be able to capture the about 40mil active SIM cards?

What’s the benefit to the Mobile Network operators to have less number of SIM cards registered?

What’s the motive of government to make the fairly new Ghana card which is less prevalent and hard to acquire the only document for registering SIM cards?

The Mobile network operators seem to have a reason to frustrate the registeration exercise, hence the deployment of fewer registeration agents and the government is also compounding it by making Ghana card the only requirement. Read Full Story