Private Legal Practitioner, Martin Kpebu has expressed worry over the government’s handling of the SIM card re-registration exercise.

He said government is being too aggressive with the exercise.

His comment comes after the National Communications Authority rolled out some punitive actions against users who have not registered their Cards.

Speaking on the AM Show, Monday, Mr. Martin Kpebu said the target by the government to register all SIM cards by the end of September this year cannot be achieved.

“I think that let us have further education and extend the deadline. The aggression to register all the SIM Cards within such a short time is too much. This is a public service, it is not as if Ghana is coming to an end in December this year. They should sit back and let us continue to educate people and make it easier,” he noted.

Mr. Kpebu further called on the Communications and Digitalisation Ministry to put a halt to the re-registration exercise considering the current economic woes.

“They should shelve it, we are hard-pressed for now and from January to August our cedi has tumbled…These are really hard times and the Minister of Communications should slow down. This is not the time to be throttling us about registration…they should slow down and let us see when times get better, we can gradually register.”

Meanwhile, the National Communications Authority (NCA) has rolled out some punitive actions against users who have not registered their SIM Cards.

This new measure takes effect from Monday, September 5, 2022.

According to a statement signed by the Authority’s Director-General, outgoing calls and data services for a sequential batch of numbers will be blocked for 2 days weekly on a rotational basis.

“MNOs [Mobile Network Operators] shall divide the unregistered SIMs into five batches for the purpose of implementing this punitive measure.

“These measures shall exclude blocking of SMS to give defaulting subscribers the opportunity to initiate registration if they so wish. Subscribers who fully register their SIM Cards within the period they have been blocked will only be unblocked by the MNOs after the 48 hours to avoid the MNOs tampering with their systems intermittently,” parts of the statement read.