Taxi driver strips naked, curses service providers over blocked SIM card
A taxi driver who appeared infuriated with the ongoing SIM registration exercise has rained curses on service providers for blocking his SIM.
In a viral video, the angry driver stripped naked in front of one of the telecommunication companies in Accra, complaining bitterly about his predicament.
It is unclear what ensued in the office to cause him to go haywire, but bystanders were taken aback when the young man crossed the busy road naked, with a bottle in hand.
On reaching the road’s median, he raised the bottle high, chanted incantations in anger, and poured libation to invoke the power of a deity to strike the authorities involved.
He then crossed back to the office’s car park, where his taxi was parked.
taxi driver goes naked and curse MTN for blocking his sim pic.twitter.com/vOJap7Os9B
— Kofi xKOFI (@kofighozt) September 8, 2022
The taxi driver is not the only person who has expressed frustration over the ongoing exercise and punitive measures introduced beginning September 5.
Several other persons claim they have gone to get their biometric data captured, but their SIM cards are being flagged as unregistered.
Others also feel they are being mistreated because they have successfully registered for the Ghana Card, but the National Identification Authority (NIA) is yet to deliver the Ghana Card to enable them to register.
Many have therefore called for an extension of the ongoing SIM registration exercise.
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, September 5, 2022.
“From Monday, September 5, 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, September 7, 2022.”
It also said the punitive measures for data services for uncompleted SIM card registrants would kick in from September 12.
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 September 30, 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.