Former President John Mahama has revealed that, his SIM Card was blocked for two days by the National Communications Authority.
According John Mahama, the National Communications Authority (NCA) has blocked his SIM card for two days despite registering it with the Ghana card.
Mr. Mahama stated that , in spite of the fact that he together with members of his staff had reregistered their SIM cards, it was blocked.
This comes after the NCA communicated to all Mobile Network Operators (MNO) that punitive actions will be taken against users who have still not re-registered their SIM cards on Monday, September 5, 2022.
In a letter signed by the Director-General, the NCA reminded the MNOs of the registration exercise which is ending on September 30, 2022.
“Please be informed that the punitive measures which were discussed at the meeting at the NCA on 3rd August 2022, were compiled and reviewed following your submission. After a comprehensive review and with the approval of the Honourable Minister for Communications, Please find below the punitive measures,” the letter stated.
speaking on TV3, Mr. Mahama said it was problematic for the NCA and other regulatory bodies to implement punitive measures against persons who through no fault of theirs have been unable to register their SIM cards.
“The SIM registration, you can even start with new SIM cards and say that ‘No Ghana Card, No SIM card’ if you are purchasing. So we can start at that point while we mop up the others in the system. But if you say by September 30th, everybody must have it or else we will take punitive actions against you…your data will be more expensive, we will block your outgoing calls and so on and so forth, that’s a major problem.
“And I must say I suffered a bit of that experience with the call barring. On one of my phones, my outgoing calls were not going through. My SIM was blocked for two days. They have turned it back on. We went through the process of registering.
“They said it wasn’t registered properly. That’s the kind of information I got, we didn’t complete the exercise and yet they came here and sat with us and did SIM registration here and we called them to my office and so all my staff and everybody went through the registration but most of my staff found their calls blocked,” Mahama stated.
Meanwhile, the NCA has withdrawn its earlier directive to telecommunication companies to bar calls from customers who have not registered their SIM cards yet.
Following the new directive by the regulator, NCA, the telcos have now stopped barring calls by their subscribers who are yet to complete their SIM card registration.
