National ID issuance begins in August - Bawumia

Vice President, Dr Mahamadu Bawumia says government intends to start issuing National Identity Cards by the end of September this year.

This, he said, would enable government to manage the economy properly while instilling social discipline in the country.

Dr Bawumia announced this when he spoke on behalf of the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo at the two-day National Policy Summit in Accra yesterday.

He indicated that government would also introduce a National Digital Address System which would allow Ghana to leapfrog into a digital mapping address system rather than the current street naming system.

According to him, work has already started on the National Digital Address System, with the hope that by July this year, it would be ready.

This is expected to be ready before the release of the National ID cards.

The rationale, according to the Vice President was that “when you go to register for your National ID, you will also have your address so that we are able to capture the two in the database.”

He believes “this will make sure that every place that we have in Ghana here has a unique GPS code, postcode and we can identify uniquely wherever to deliver goods or services to those addresses.”

The Vice President also talked about what has come to be known and accepted as inter-operability.

That, he said would enable companies and organizations especially in the financial sector, such as banks and telecommunications companies to easily do business transaction among themselves with ease.

Government hopes to achieve that too by the end of this year.

“We believe that when that is done, it will represent really a major transformation of the economy”, Dr Bawumia noted.

For him, these are the soft pieces of infrastructure which he prefers to call ‘unwritten rules of the game’ that would change the economy dramatically.

He, however, expressed concern about the fact that the country has lots of assets but yet was getting little out of these assets.

In that regard, he said “we are going to form the Ghana Assets Management Corporation that will put together all the assets of the country.”

It would be the mandate of the body to ensure the management and maintenance of these assets.