The Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Prof Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah has said that over 17 million Ghanaians have been registered for the Ghana Card as of February 2023.

It is recalled that the registration for the Ghana Card, also known as the ECOWAS identity card began in the year 2017.

The national ID system was implemented to ensure that each citizen had a unique identity, which cannot be claimed by another person.

Speaking on JoyNews' Newsfile on Saturday, Prof Attafuah used the opportunity to update stakeholders on the progress made by the NIA in registering Ghanaians.

“This is a good opportunity to explain to the good people of this country where we are. As of the 19th of February [2023], that is the beginning of last week, we had registered 17, 375,861 Ghanaians,” he disclosed.

The NIA boss further revealed that his outfit has printed a total number of 16,737,734 cards as of February 19, 2023.

He added that in 2017, the NIA issued out 900,000 cards to Ghanaians almost exclusively in the Greater Accra region of the country, but by February 2023, a total amount of 16,095,331 cards had been handed out to Ghanaians.

Prof Attafuah also highlighted that the cards that are being issued in 2023 are of a more advanced module than the ones issued in 2017.

He described the new cards as “top-notch” and of the “highest caliber in the whole world.”

The NIA boss explained that “In 2017, we [NIA] were issuing a 2D barcode card … with only 4 fingerprints and a 2kilobyte storage capacity. Today, we are issuing smart dual-interface biometric cards with 10 fingerprints and a 148 storage capacity card —a chip— that is chip embedded. That is the kind of architecture that we have built for this nation.

He stated that the statistics of the registered cards that were being bandied about by persons such as the Adaklu legislator, Kwame Governs Agbodza could not have come from the NIA database.

He, therefore, stressed that “if you are looking for data, come to NIA and we will give it to you.”