The decision to register Ghanaians anew comes six years after the Authority began a mass registration exercise, completing it in seven regions and parts of the three northern regions; and card distribution exercises in parts of the Greater Accra Region.<\/p>\n
According to Chinery-Hesse, if the Authority opts for a simple and inexpensive card, it will be needless for them to \u201crun around borrowing money and impoverishing and embarrassing our country.<\/p>\n
The Public Affairs Director of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Bertha Dzeble, has defended the authority’s decision and said there is the need to upgrade their system<\/strong><\/span><\/a> to meet international standards.<\/p>\n Speaking on Eyewitness News<\/strong>, Chinery-Hesse stated that the production of the cards can be done locally.<\/p>\n [contextly_sidebar id=”8Hx5snxMPrq8fqzHZLlZAD6b3b30WJ8h”]\u201cIf you get two local firms, they can put this together in no time to solve 99% of the problem\u2026and it won\u2019t cost more than $10 million in terms of the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n He remarked that \u201cif they [NIA] are saying there is an international regulation that stops them from doing it and making them have to go for an expensive solution or a complex imported solution, well, that is a different matter.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut if all we needed to do was identify Ghanaians, see who is a child, see who is a woman, with a simple cheap card; in fact if you push it hard, you can even tie it to people\u2019s phones so that we won\u2019t need a card at all.\u201d<\/p>\n The technology engineer recommended that the best way to handle the situation is to get a \u201csingle card which is just a reference point so that all the data regarding one person lives rather on the cloud. So we really don\u2019t need to have the information on the card as long as you can identify that this is the guy holding the card.\u201d<\/p>\n Chinery-Hesse added that contracting local technologists to undertake the project \u201cwill give a lot of Ghanaian programmers\u2026the people who manage data bases and it will give the children coming out of the university a chance and it will cost much, much less.\u201d<\/p>\n In a related development, the president of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe said he is astonished at the surprise being expressed by Ghanaians over the NIA\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n He recalled that about a year and a half ago, IMANI officials met with the NIA executives to challenge them to abort the intention to organize a new nationwide registration exercise.<\/p>\n But according to him, \u201cthey were not convincing enough to give us any real reasons why they were going to sideline something they had done, wasted tax payer money and then going to start another exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n Cudjoe was convinced that the amount of money which has been contracted to undertake the project signifies that \u201ca lot of cooking has been going on.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n –![\"Franklin](\"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Franklin-Cudjoe.jpg\")
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\nBy: Efua Idan Osam\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana
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