A concerned Ghanaian writes on what is at stake and why it must be done right this time
Ask anyone in Accra’s Makola Market whether they know someone who has lost money to mobile money fraud. You will not wait long for an answer. A trader whose savings were wiped out overnight by someone using a SIM card registered under a stolen identity. A driver who received a call from a number that turned out to belong to someone who had registered it using another person’s Ghana Card. A family who woke up to find their mobile wallet emptied, with no legal trail to follow and no institution able to tell them who held the SIM that did it.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable consequence of a broken system. And the reason that system is broken, specifically, is that for fifteen years and across three successive re-registration exercises, Ghana has never once properly linked a SIM card to a verified human identity.
That sentence deserves a moment of stillness. Three exercises. Hundreds of millions of cedis spent. Millions of Ghanaians queuing, presenting their documents, submitting to the process, trusting that it would be worth it. And at the end of all of it, according to an official audit of records collected in the 2021 to 2023 exercise, there were zero successful biometric matches against the National Identification Authority database. Not a low number. Not a worrying percentage. Zero.
The equipment telcos used during the 2022 exercise could not even speak the same technical language as the NIA’s database. Contactless scanners were deployed by telcos whose data was to be matched against a system built on contact scanners. It is like pouring water into a container with no bottom and wondering why nothing is being stored. The entire exercise, by its own audit, produced nothing that can be legally relied upon.
This is what Communications Minister Samuel Nartey George has inherited. This is why the 2026 re-registration exercise is not a punishment of citizens or a bureaucratic obsession. It is the only honest response to evidence that the work was never properly done.
What Is Different This Time
Critics, and there are credible ones, have argued that this is simply another round of the same failed cycle. The civil society think tank IMANI has raised pointed questions about procurement transparency, the adequacy of the legal framework and the technical contradiction between USSD self-service channels and biometric verification requirements. These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers, not reassurances.
But set beside the three previous exercises, the 2026 framework has structural differences that matter. First, biometric verification involving real-time facial recognition and fingerprint authentication will be validated directly against the NIA database, making the NIA the single source of truth on identity. This did not happen before. Second, Hon. Sam George has explicitly stated that this is not a sole-sourced procurement, that telecommunications companies will bear the cost, and that no financial burden will fall on the Ghanaian taxpayer. Third, a new Legislative Instrument is being prepared that will, for the first time, formally govern data custody, inter-agency responsibilities and citizen rights under the exercise.
MTN Ghana, the country’s largest telecom operator, has publicly supported the exercise and committed to funding its participation within existing budgets. The company’s chief executive has confirmed that biometric verification, including fingerprint and facial recognition, will be central to the process, and that structured digital appointment systems will prevent the chaos that defined previous rounds.
The Real Problem That This Fixes
There is a specific fraud that Ghanaians rarely discuss openly because it is embarrassing and widespread. People have registered SIM cards using Ghana Cards that do not belong to them. Registered SIMs linked to identities they do not hold. In some cases, agents at registration points registered multiple SIMs under a single individual’s identity without that person’s knowledge. In other cases, SIM cards were registered using stolen or photocopied ID documents, creating a class of active mobile numbers that cannot be traced to any real, verifiable person.
This is not a small category of exceptions. It is a structural gap that fraudsters, scammers and criminals have exploited deliberately and systematically. Until every active SIM in Ghana is linked to a verified, biometrically authenticated individual, the mobile money ecosystem will remain a hunting ground for people who wish to steal from it.
The human cost of this is not abstract. Farmers who save through mobile money and lose everything. Small business owners whose working capital is wiped out by a transfer they did not authorise. Women who run market stalls and have no bank account, only a mobile wallet, which disappears because someone registered a SIM under a name that was never really theirs. The SIM re-registration is, at its core, a consumer protection exercise.
Ghana’s Digital Economy Depends on This
According to the Bank of Ghana, the value of transactions passing through Ghana’s mobile money infrastructure runs into hundreds of billions of cedis each year. This is not a peripheral financial product. For millions of Ghanaians, mobile money is the bank. It is how remittances arrive. It is how school fees are paid. It is how small traders settle with suppliers.
That entire ecosystem rests on trust. Investors in Ghana’s digital economy, fintech companies weighing whether to build here, international financial institutions assessing risk, all of them look at whether the identity infrastructure underpinning mobile transactions is reliable. A Ghana where SIM cards are properly linked to verified identities is a Ghana where fintech can grow with confidence, where financial inclusion deepens, and where the digital economy becomes genuinely competitive.
A Ghana where three successive registration exercises produced nothing usable is a Ghana with a credibility problem it cannot afford to carry into the next decade of digital development.
What Citizens Should Demand, and What They Should Do
The critics are right that the government must answer specific technical questions before the exercise proceeds. How will USSD self-service channels satisfy biometric verification requirements? What legal provisions in the new Legislative Instrument will prevent biometric data from being transferred to telco vendors? Who will bear accountability if data custody fails again? These are not hostile questions. They are the conditions of a trustworthy process.
Citizens should also be clear about their own role. When the exercise opens, participate through official designated channels only. Do not hand your Ghana Card to an agent you do not know. Do not allow someone to register a SIM on your behalf through informal means. Report any registration point where someone is attempting to register multiple SIMs under a single identity. Accountability flows both ways.
Hon. Samuel Nartey George has said this exercise is seventy-five per cent communication and twenty-five per cent technology. That framing matters. It is an acknowledgment that Ghanaians do not simply need to be processed through a system. They need to trust it. They need to understand why it exists, what it will protect and what will be different when it is done.
The mobile money fraud that has drained savings from market traders and stolen working capital from small businesses is not inevitable. It is the result of a system that was never properly built. This is Ghana’s opportunity to build it properly. The cost of getting it wrong again is not another audit report. It is another decade of fraud, another generation of eroded trust, and another lost window to build the digital economy this country deserves.
The writer is a Ghanaian citizen with an interest in digital governance and consumer protection.
When Criticism Is Not About Governance: Sam George, The Family Values Bill and the Campaign to Rewrite His Record
There is a pattern that has become familiar in Ghanaian public discourse whenever the name Hon. Samuel Nartey George appears in a headline. The criticism comes quickly. It travels widely. It is amplified on international platforms and shared in networks that reach far beyond Ghana’s borders. And if you read carefully, if you trace the sources, if you notice which voices are loudest and what vocabulary they use, you begin to notice something worth naming plainly: a significant share of the hostility directed at Hon. Sam George as a minister is not about his governance record. It is about the Family Values Bill.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an observable pattern. Since Hon. Sam George first championed what became the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill in 2021, international LGBTQ+ advocacy networks have treated him as a specific and named target. When he appeared on CNN in October 2021 and held his ground with composure, referencing Ghana’s 1992 Constitution and refusing to be rattled by a hostile interview, Ghanaians celebrated him and those same networks catalogued it as evidence of the threat he posed to their global agenda.
He has been the subject of co-ordinated campaigns on social media platforms headquartered in countries where the Family Values Bill is considered an affront. International media organisations with explicit editorial positions on LGBTQ+ rights have published pieces that characterise him primarily through that lens. Advocacy groups that receive funding from foreign foundations have written open letters, issued statements and cultivated Ghanaian media relationships, all aimed at keeping pressure on a minister and member of parliament whose primary sin, in their view, is that he reflects the values of the constituency that elected him.
While the noise has been loudest on identity politics, what has Hon. Samuel Nartey George actually been doing as Minister for Communications, Digital Technology and Innovation?
He has taken on the SIM re-registration challenge that his predecessors left unresolved across three consecutive exercises, announcing a framework grounded in real-time NIA biometric verification, funded by telecom operators at no cost to the taxpayer, and supported by Ghana’s largest network, MTN Ghana. The significance of this cannot be understated. The previous exercises collectively failed to produce a single verified biometric match against the NIA database. He is the minister who inherited that failure and is now required to fix it.
He has been a consistent and vocal presence on digital infrastructure, cybersecurity and Ghana’s positioning within the continental digital economy conversation. He has represented Ghana at international telecommunications forums and has been part of the Mahama administration’s broader effort to restore economic credibility after the fiscal crisis years. He has kept the connectivity agenda alive in a government managing the dual pressures of IMF programme compliance and the demands of a population that needs digital access to grow.
And he has done all of this while simultaneously being subjected to pressure from international actors who would prefer he abandon his position on the Family Values Bill. He has not abandoned it. On BBC Newsday in February 2026, he stated his position clearly and calmly, separating his capacity as a Member of Parliament from his role as a minister, and reaffirming that his commitment to the legislation he helped write remains unchanged.
The tactic being used against him is conflation. Take a minister’s legislative advocacy on a social issue that the international community disapproves of, and use it to cast doubt on everything he does in office. Treat every policy announcement as suspect. Amplify every critic, regardless of whether the criticism is technically grounded or politically motivated. Create the impression, through volume and repetition, that a minister who is controversial on one issue must therefore be failing on all issues.
Ghanaians are not obligated to accept that framing. Ghanaians can evaluate a minister’s work on its merits. They can ask whether the digital infrastructure is improving. They can ask whether the re-registration exercise is designed properly and whether its procurement is transparent. They can hold the minister to account for real failures and real shortcomings. That is legitimate scrutiny. What is not legitimate is allowing an internationally co-ordinated campaign, funded and animated by interests outside this country, to define how Ghana evaluates one of its own ministers.
The Family Values Bill did not emerge from the imagination of one man. It was first introduced by eight members of parliament from across the political divide in 2021. It passed the Ghanaian parliament with bipartisan support in 2024. When it was reintroduced in 2025, ten MPs from both the NDC and NPP sponsored it. The Supreme Court dismissed two separate legal challenges to it. Polls consistently showed majority Ghanaian support for its passage. Sam George did not impose this position on Ghana. He represented it, and he continues to do so.
There is a legitimate debate to be had about the specific provisions of the Family Values Bill, about proportionality, about implementation and about Ghana’s relationships with international partners whose funding touches areas of national development. Ghanaians should have that debate on Ghanaian terms, with Ghanaian voices at its centre.
That debate is entirely different from a campaign to tarnish a minister’s governance record because international advocates dislike his legislative positions. One is engaged civic discourse. The other is political sabotage dressed as public interest commentary.
When IMANI raises technical questions about SIM re-registration procurement and data architecture, that is the kind of scrutiny every Ghanaian minister should face and every Ghanaian citizen should welcome. When internationally connected networks amplify negative stories about Sam George’s ministry while remaining silent on equivalent governance questions about other ministers, the asymmetry is worth noting.
Samuel Nartey George will be judged by Ghanaians on whether he delivers a functioning digital identity system, whether Ghana’s connectivity improves, whether the re-registration exercise works this time, and whether the communications sector grows under his watch. That is the correct basis of evaluation.
Not what CNN thinks. Not what advocacy networks headquartered in London and Washington think. Not whether he has satisfied the conditions of international platforms whose definitions of acceptable governance are written without reference to the sovereign choices of the Ghanaian people.
That distinction matters. And it is time to say it clearly.
