Executive Director for the National Identification Authority (NIA), Professor Ken Agyemang Attafuah, has announced that all is set for the registration for the national identification card.
The exercise he told Accra based Citi FM will kick start May 28, 2018. He said, the registration is starting from the Greater Accra region on May 28 and that the NIA expects to register all Ghanaian citizens in Ghana within one year.
According to him, in the Greater Accra region, “we will be here for approximately three months. A lot will depend on the speed with which the registration goes.
It is estimated that when Bernard Avle gets to a registration centre, he will not spend more than 30 minutes and walk away with a card,” he said. He added: “there is a human factor there, the person operating the equipment and weather conditions and all of that, to the extent possible to use technology to address most of the problems that we had encountered some 10years ago, but there is still a human element.
Our expectation is that this job will be done very professionally and meticulously and we will in about three months , at most, we’d have registered every Ghanaian in Greater Accra.
From Greater Accra, the registration team move to Volta Region followed by Northern, Upper East, Upper West, Brong Ahafo, Western, Ashanti, Eastern and Central regions.
He added: “Approximately six months after the commencement of the national exercise in Ghana, we will also commence the registration of Ghanaians in the diaspora."
President Akufo-Addo received his card in September 2017 at a ceremony held at the premises of the National Identification Authority.
The president at the launch stated that the launch of the card “constitutes a practical demonstration of the fulfilment of yet another promise of my party, the New Patriotic Party, made during the 2016 campaign.” President Akufo-Addo noted that the new Ghana Card is a great improvement over the previous one, and meets all international standards required of such identity documents.
“For example, the national identity card has been enhanced to take advantage of new technologies such as tactile elements for the blind, chip embedding technology and iris capabilities in addition to taking all 10 fingerprints of an applicant,” he said.