Minister for Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, says government will begin a fresh nationwide SIM registration exercise by the first quarter of 2026.

The Minister said the previous exercise conducted under former Minister Ursula Owusu-Ekuful and the former NPP government was invalid.

He argued that “the registrations that were purported to have been done by Ursula Owusu and the NPP did not cross-reference the biometrics they took from you against that database. Nothing of that sort was done.”

Mr George said the necessary legal framework is almost ready. According to him, “the L.I is ready and again I am meticulous about what I am doing. First quarter next year, we will run it out. We are currently at the Public Procurement Authority doing the procurement of the service provider to do the SIM registration.”

He said that the new process will be grounded in law. “We have drafted the L.I and it will be laid before Parliament because again there must be a proper legal basis for what we are doing. Already, there’s been testing, there’s been all kinds of things done by the regulator,” he stated.

The Minister also clarified that the upcoming exercise will not be a continuation of the previous one. “We are not doing a re-registration. We are doing a SIM registration. You didn’t do any registration, the former Minister just wasted everybody’s time,” he said.

The Minister was speaking in an interview on TV3, Wednesday, December 3, where he added that the Ministry has been working closely with the National Identification Authority (NIA) and other relevant agencies to secure a more reliable system for biometric verification.

“So, now we have sat down with the Interior Minister and his head of agency, Yayra Koku at NIA. We have worked out the integration between the Telco, the regulator, NCA, and the NIA.”

He further noted that the government is cleaning up previously collected data to ensure accuracy. “All the biometrics they (NPP) collected it was just sitting in databases scattered all over the place. We have picked those databases, and we are now cleaning them up and cross referencing them with the NIA in the backend. About 80% of them have been done,” he added.