At long last, the production and printing of the first national identification cards for Ghanaians is to begin on Monday, December 6, 2010. According to the National Identification Authority (NIA), it was now in a position to do that after the successful completion of contractual obligations for the operation of the card printing equipment, the MX 6000 Data Card, its testing and the recruitment and training of staff to manage it. With its technical solution providers, Safran Morpho, formerly Sagem, all the required international tests for certification and standards were successfully undertaken in October and November this year. The distribution of the cards would, however, be on a later date since, according to the NIA, it was still considering various options of distribution for efficiency. At a press conference in Accra yesterday, the Executive Secretary of the NIA, Dr William Ahadzie, said distribution through post offices or government agencies was being considered. The MX 6000 Data Card has the capacity to produce 1,500 cards per printer per hour and with six production units, 12,000 ID cards per day. The NIA said it would however, begin with 1,200 per printer for each one hour, until the optimal efficiency of the card production system was established. Dr Ahadzie said the schedule of distribution of the cards, which would involve batching the cards in accordance with registration centre numbers and sending them to the various centres for applicants to authenticate and collect them, would be out by January 2011. Applicants will be required to produce their collection slips for their fingerprints to be matched with those stored on the card before collection. Those without their collection slips can still have the cards as their fingerprints will be taken for the second time, once they mention their names, to be matched with data already collected. He said the NIA now had 12 million records from the mass registration exercise in the Central, Western, Volta, Greater Accra, Ashanti and Eastern regions. He urged all with complaints of mistakes on their slips in the Greater Accra Region to visit the offices of the NIA and get them corrected immediately before the card production begins. The card production and other activities of the NIA, such as the completion of the mass registration exercise for the Upper West, Upper East, Northern and Brong Ahafo regions, will go on concurrently. Dr Ahadzie said about GH¢9 million was needed for the completion of the mass registration exercise for the four regions that had not been captured. The authority has already begun its processes for the mass registration exercise in the Brong Ahafo Region in the next month or two, while registration in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions will be completed by the first quarter of 2011. On new approaches to the mass registration exercise, Dr Ahadzie mentioned online registration for applicants in Ghana that would involve the use of a scratch card and access to a portal where registration was done and a receipt printed, based on which biometric data of the applicant would then be taken at any office of the NIA. Source: Daily Graphic