Telcos are responsible for unlawful blocking of registered SIM cards- NCA

The National Communications Authority (NCA) has absolved itself from any blame regarding blocking fully registered SIM cards.

According to NCA’s Director of Legal Affairs, Dr. Poku Adusei, the telecommunication operators are to be held completely responsible for the unlawful blocking because the directive was for the companies to apply punitive measures to persons who have not fully registered their SIM cards and not otherwise.

He said it was an error on the part of the network operators to restrict functions on those SIMs since such subscribers do not fall within the scope of the punitive measures announced by the NCA.

“The directive was that if you have not gone through the two-staged process to register, certain sanctions could be applied to you, but in applying the sanctions, it is possible there could be an overreach.

“In that case, that would not be our instruction that there should be that overreach because we don’t control the networks which are in the private hands of the operators,” Dr. Adusei stated in an interview on Joy FM which was monitored by The Ghana Report on Monday, 12 September 2022.

Chaos broke out at SIM registration centres nationwide after some subscribers complained that their SIM cards that had been fully re-registered had been blocked as part of sanctions imposed for failure to comply with the government’s directive.

Dr. Adusei had said in a previous interview that the NCA “empathises with those who got wrongly affected even though they have done the first and second stages and they are able to verify by using the shortcode to confirm that.”

Meanwhile, the NCA and the Attorney-General(A-G) have been sued by the pressure group, The People’s Project (TPP), over the ongoing SIM re-registration exercise.

The group filed the suit at the Supreme Court on Friday, 9 September 2022, praying the 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 on Sunday, 4 September, 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.