The Ghanaian organisation for mobile money agents is pleading with its members to re-register their merchant SIMs before the Communications Ministry’s deadline of one month passes.
On June 7, the Ministry of Communications revealed that about 280,000 merchant SIMs had not yet been registered, giving criminals a chance to utilise them to continue their bad deeds.
Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the sector minister, updated lawmakers on the SIM re-registration process and announced that all unregistered merchant SIMs will be permanently disabled at the end of June 2023.
Evans Otumfuo, general secretary of the Ghanaian Association of Mobile Money Agents, urged his members to follow the instruction in an interview with Citi News.
- The government has given merchant subscribers a one-month deadline to register SIM cards.
- The NDC government will re-register SIM cards properly in the future.
“For the [Communications] Ministry to give us an extra one month, it is commendable, and so we are going to put in systems to make the whole process simple and also sensitize and encourage members to make it a priority to be able to meet the deadline.”
While addressing Parliament on the re-registration exercise on June 7, the Communications Minister disclosed that over 29.9 million SIM cards had been registered in the just-ended exercise but added that she “was also informed that almost 280,000 merchant SIM cards have not been registered.”
She, therefore, added that the government is giving a one-month ultimatum to enable subscribers with legitimate concerns to go through the registration process to retrieve their numbers.
