NIA sued over Digital Address requirement for Ghana Card

A private legal practitioner, Francis Kojo Kwarteng Arthur, has sued the National Identification Authority (NIA).

The suit is to challenge the Authority’s requirement of a digital address for the registration and issuance of the Ghana Card.

Mr. Arthur wants the High Court to pronounce the digital address requirement as an illegality that should be scrapped from the requirement for the national ID card.

He told Citi News that his research showed that there was no regulation in the GhanaPost and Courier Services Act that recognizes the digital address system.

“The digital address code is being powered by GhanaPost, so I got the Ghana Post and Courier Services Act and regulations, and looked through it, and there was nothing there operationalizing digital address code in Ghana. I am a lawyer and I’m in denial, so what about the ordinary person on the streets. So I decided to test it in court. My readings show me that there is no act operationalizing the digital address code so I want the court to declare that the digital address code is an illegality hence Ghanaian citizens who are willing and present themselves at the NIA to be registered should not be denied the Ghana card on the basis of not having the digital address code.”

The mass registration for the Ghana Card started 3 days ago in the Adentan municipality in the Greater Accra Region.

The process has however been described as extremely slow, with some technical challenges.

But the Executive Secretary of the NIA, Prof. Ken Atafuah, told Citi News that the registration process had been slowed down because many of those who turned up for the registration did not show up with their digital addresses.

He blamed Ghana Post for not adequately sensitizing the general public to generate the digital addresses which he said is a requirement for the acquisition of the Ghana Card.

But the lawyer, Kwarteng Arthur, insists that the digital address must not be a requirement.

source: citinewsroom