It is a huge loss to us – Telecommunications Chamber on deactivating 9 million SIM cards

Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Ken Ashigbey, says its members are unhappy to be deactivating 9 million SIM cards in compliance with the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization’s November 11, 2022 directive. 

According to him, the deactivation is a great loss to them.

“The telcos are unhappy to be deactivating the SIM cards of 9 million Ghanaians and I am sure the Ministry of Communications and NCA feel the same. It comes as a great loss to us . The barring of these customers means they won’t purchase airtime and the communication service tax and others which go to the government will be lost. Barring of customers is something the telcos are very unhappy about,” he told Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show.

Mr. Ashibey revealed the telcos put in place various initiatives to motivate customers to complete the SIM re-registration process, and prevent this from happening but they didn’t succeed as much.

The revenue per user for telcos in 2021 was around Ghc20.00 per user daily. Using that same figure, this means the telcos will loss some GHC 180,000,000 daily for deactivating the SIM cards of 9 million customers.

The telecommunications chamber says it will however keep the various registration outlets open and restore the services of customers who complete their registration.

To them, the SIM re-registration exercise is a good policy which provides a robust database and prevents fraud.

Since November 20, 2022 telcos have, as directed by the Ministry, been blocking data services for all subscribers who have only completed stage 1 of SIM registration (linkage of SIM to Ghana Card) but not stage 2 (biometric capture).

The Chamber clarified that the category of subscribers to be blocked from the midnight of November 30, 2022 are “only subscribers that have completed stage 1 (linkage to Ghana Card) but are yet to complete stage 2 (biometric capture) of the SIM registration.”

It said the services to be blocked on those SIM cards are Voice, Data (mobile phones, Mi-Fi, other data devices), SMS (incoming and outgoing), USSD, Mobile Money services, and Emergency services.

By: Joel Sanco