Pressure group, The People’s Project (TPP), has dragged the government to court over the ongoing SIM card re-registration exercise and its directive to block all unregistered SIM cards by September 30.
The court action follows the Communication Ministry’s earlier caution and recent sanctions imposed by the National Communications Authority (NCA) against subscribers who have yet to re-registered their SIM cards.
The punitive measures, which took effect on September 5, include the blocking of all outgoing calls and data services of defaulting subscribers for 48 hours per week.
Already, the ramifications of the sanctions are biting defiant subscribers so hard that, even those who have complied are feeling the pinch.
The group, led by its convenor, Kwame A-Plus on Friday, September 9, filed documents at the Supreme Court seeking a declaration that the deadline and the associated punitive measures are “arbitrary, capricious, amounts to an abuse of discretion and same is unconstitutional, null, void and of no legal effect.”
He argues that “the same government that cannot provide Ghana cards to Ghanaians for SIM card registration must not be allowed to execute a directive by the communications minister that unregistered SIM cards will be blocked by 30th September.”
Below is the full writ of summon
On Sunday, July 31, 2022, the government, for the second time, extended the deadline for the SIM card re-registration exercise to 30th September 2022.
The Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu, announced at the time that “any sim that has not been registered by end of August will be barred from receiving services”.
Some mobile network subscribers have said they are experiencing interruptions in service.
