Deputy Ranking Member on the Communications Committee in Parliament, Sam George has asked Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu to apologise to Ghanaians and admit to the erroneous manner in which she is handling the SIM cards re-registration exercise.

Ursula Owusu in a Facebook post weeks ago vowed not to extend the September 30 deadline for re-registration of SIM cards.

She noted that a full raft of punitive measures will soon be rolled out against persons who fail to register their SIM Cards.

“At a subsequent press conference in September, the full scope of the sanctions will be revealed.

“If you suffer that fate as a result of your own inaction, kindly do not blame your service provider. To be forewarned is to be forearmed,” the Minister cautioned.

But Sam George in an interview on Top Story, Thursday, said the Minister’s handling of the situation is untenable and makes her “technically bereft” to oversee the re-registration exercise.

“Let me state without equivocation that the Minister would have to eat a humble pie. The Minister will have to realise that she serves the people of this Republic and the people of this Republic are not her subjects… I mean we have a Minister who is so technically bereft of competence to execute a simple policy like a SIM registration, you have this mess,” he told Evans Mensah.

The Ningo-Prampram MP argued that the Minister can simply not deactivate SIM cards after the September deadline since that will create a lot of inconveniences.

“First of October will come the SIM cards will still be active because you cannot simply block SIM cards like that,” he added.

The MP further called on Ghanaians who have registered for their Ghana Cards but have still not received it to provide their data to his office for action to be taken against the National Identification Authority.

Also, Vice-President of IMANI Africa, Selorm Branttie criticised the Minister for the manner in which she is handling the exercise.

He described the process as “recalcitrant and most inefficient”.

“It is basically because she has decided to be recalcitrant and choose the most inefficient of all the processes that were available, the most human intensive, the most resource-intensive and the worst way possible to handle this…is this the way to handle this as a Minister-in-charge of Digitalisation? She chose the worst and most inefficient, backward route to handle a service that is most crucial to this nation,” he said.

JoyNews checks at some registration centres across the country a day before the September 30 deadline indicate that many Ghanaians for some days now have besieged the centres with the same complaint of inability to register their SIM cards.