NIA shouldn’t cede mandate to private entity - Ahadzi
A former Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Dr William Ahadzi has raised security concerns over the decision by the Authority to venture into a Public Private Partnership (PPP) to undertake a fresh registration of all Ghanaians.
According to him, the biometric registration process is a security driven operation which needs to be protected by the state.
In a radio interview on Joy FM Wednesday morning Dr Ahadzi noted that the new programmes and policies that were being introduced by the NIA were going to kill the authority in no time.
The NIA last month announced that it had successfully negotiated a $115 million loan facility from Exim China to help it undertake a fresh registration of all Ghanians under an “expanded registration project”.
Under the “expanded registration project”, the NIA would retrieve the little over one million Ghanacards already issued and would replace them with an instant smart identification card.
The Ministry of Finance’s Public Private Partnership (PPP) Approval Committee has given approval for the NIA to issue a licence to local and foreign identity management companies to execute the mass registration exercise.
According to the NIA, it was taking advantage of the “burgeoning PPP regime in Ghana, which has become a government policy, to partner with private sector firms to achieve the mandate.”
But in the radio interview , Dr Ahadzi said, “things happen in this country in very odd ways. The institution has to be saved because you can’t get the Ghana Standards Board to cede its original mandate to a private entity and still exist as an entity. The programmes and policies that are being introduced now are going to kill off the authority in no time.”
He explained further that the biometric data which was to be collected by the NIA needed to be protected by the state “because you have the data of both the president, the vice president and everybody in the data base and you don’t leave those things in the hands of a private entity.”
“In other parts of the world, it is run by the ministry of interior or some other intelligence agency because anything can happen when people get access to someone’s biometric data,” he said.
In May 2012, the NIA ventured into a PPP with Identification Management Systems (IMS), a private company to begin a pilot registration of foreign nationals resident in the country.
But Dr Ahadzi explained that that PPP under his tenure was not meant to virtually usurp the main responsibilities of the NIA but to give the Authority the opportunity to build the capacity of its staff.
“We can do PPP on aspects of the work of the NIA but not the management of the data,” he explained.
Substantive boss
Dr William Ahadzi was appointed Executive Secretary of the NIA in 2009 but he was asked to proceed on an indefinite leave in April 2013.
He insisted he was the substantive boss of the NIA because he has not received any letter informing him that his appointment had been terminated.
“I am still on leave technically but my salaries have been suspended. So in principle, I am still the substantive executive secretary of the NIA. That is what it means,” he said.
