The National Communications Authority (NCA) and the Attorney-General (A-G) have been sued over the ongoing SIM re-registration exercise.
The suit was filed by the pressure group, The People’s Project (TPP) on Friday, 9 September, at the Supreme Court.
Ultimately, they want the apex court to declare the 30 September deadline and its associated punitive measures null and void.
“A declaration that on a true and proper interpretation of Articles 2, 23, and 296 of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, the decision of the 1st Defendant to restrict, penalise and prevent unregistered SIMs from undertaking certain activities including making outgoing calls from 5 September 2022 in a letter dated 4 September 2022 while not all Ghanaians have been issued with the Ghana card for the re-registration exercise is arbitrary, capricious, unconstitutional and of no legal effect.”
Punitive measures announced
A press release issued by the NCA in Accra last Sunday read: “A set of punitive measures designed to culminate the year-long nationwide SIM registration exercise will kick in from Monday, 5 September 2022.
“From Monday, 5 September 2022, subscribers who have not started their registration will have all outgoing calls re-routed to an interactive voice recording (IVR) for a SIM registration sensitisation message to be played before all calls are connected.
“Subscribers with uncompleted registration; that is, those who linked their Ghana cards to their SIM cards via *404# but have not proceeded to have their biodata captured, will also face similar disruption in service from Wednesday, 7 September 2022.”
It also said the punitive measures for data services for uncompleted SIM card registrants would kick in from 12 September.
The release said outgoing calls and data services would be blocked for affected subscribers for 48 hours once a week once the punitive measures kicked in from September 2022.
Also, subscribers who had neither begun stage one nor completed stage two of the SIM registration process would be allowed to reconnect their SIMs after duly completing the two stages of the registration process, it said.
“After 30 September 2022, these SIMs as described above will not have access to any service, as their SIMs will be deactivated.
Subscribers will have a period of six months to register to redeem their SIMs, failing which their numbers will be churned – that is, re-assigned to the pool to be sold to potential new subscribers.