NIA begins registration in Ashanti from Dec.11

The National Identification Authority (NIA) would from December 11, 2019 to January 8, 2020 register Ghanaian residents in the Ashanti Region and issue them with the Ghana Card.

The authority intends to register over 2.8 million people in the region and will deploy a total of 15,000 registration officers to the 833 registration centres that it would set up in the region.

So far, the exercise has been conducted in 11 regions throughout the country out of which over two million cards have been issued.

Press conference

Addressing the media to announce the commencement of the exercise in the region, the Executive Secretary of the NIA, Prof. Kenneth Agyeman Attafuah, said the authority would operate from 47 district offices where a number of centres would be set under the district offices and appealed to the residents to move to any of the centres closer to them to get themselves registered.

He warned the staff against extorting money from the people and also asked the residents not to pay any money to any official from the authority for the purposes of being registered for the card.

He said the process was free of charge and that residents would only pay for the card if they misplaced it or during a renewal.

Foreigners

According to him, even though foreigners would also be registered under the authority, the mass registration exercise was open to only Ghanaians aged 15 years and above.

He said those in the Diaspora would also be registered under a different exercise and defined a Ghanaian as anyone born of a Ghanaian parent and their children were eligible to register.

He said foreigners, who were legally or permanently resident in Ghana, were required by the law to register with the NIA

The items required for the registration, he said, were a birth certificate or a Ghanaian passport, a digital address and any other forms of identification such as the Social Security and National Insurance Trust card, Driving Licence, Tax Identification Number and a National Health Insurance card.

Prof. Attafuah, however, explained that with the exception of the digital address and the birth certificate or passport, the other IDs were not mandatory for one to be registered.

Vouching

He said those without passport or a birth certificate could get a family member who had been registered and issued with the Ghana card to vouch for them but warned that those who would be using this system to make money and vouch for people they had no relations with, would be dealt with by the law.

Besides that, he said those who were unable to get any family member to vouch for them, one would need to find two people who have already registered and who could vouch for their nationality to enable them to register.

Statistics

So far, he said, the authority had registered a total of 4,857, 845 Ghanaians, printed a total of 4, 291 840 cards and issued 2, 695, 478 biometric Ghana cards.

He said the Ashanti Region is the region the Authority is targeting its largest number to be registered and believed that the exercise would be successful as the authority now has the full complement of its equipment.