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A group of Ghanaian individuals are leading a campaign to boycott a SIM card re-registration exercise aimed at combatting SIM card fraud and other related crimes.
Dubbed, ‘No calls Day’, the group which calls itself Concerned Mobile Subscribers have set aside Tuesday, February 8, to embark on a nationwide protest against the ongoing exercise which started late last year and ends in March 2022.
Mobile phone users risk losing their contact numbers should they fail to re-register the SIM cards.
But in a statement released on Thursday, the group argued that “any attempt to impose this [SIM card re-registration] on subscribers or block their lines would amount to an infringement on their property rights.”
On the February 8 protest the group said: “We call on all Ghanaians not to make or receive phone calls as a way of registering our disquiet about the circus surrounding the SIM card re-registration exercise.”
The group includes a former Kumbungu Member of Parliament, Ras Mubarak; Dean of UG’s School of Law, Prof. Raymond Atuguba; President and Vice President of IMANI-Africa – Franklin Cudjoe and Kofi Bentil; Private Legal Practitioner, Samson Lardi Anyenini, and Investigative Journalist, Manasseh Azure Awuni.
“The ‘No Calls Day’ boycott on 8th February would be the first in a series of national boycotts to protest the current inhumane process of re-registration of SIM cards.”
“There is no law in Ghana that requires Ghanaian mobile network subscribers to “re-register” their SIM cards,” they argued.
Below are their demands:
- The National Communication Authority (NCA) should immediately withdraw its directive for mobile network customers to re-register their SIM cards by 31st March 2022.
- When the appropriate legal framework is in place, a re-registration exercise can be done without having subscribers spend productive hours and several days in long queues in the midst of a ravaging Covid-19 pandemic.
- There’s understandably a need to eliminate crime. But the fight against criminals must be within the law.
- We therefore demand that the NCA and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) must come up with a better and innovative way of re-registering the SIM cards by first amending existing law; and secondly to do so without the current inhumane re-registration process we are witnessing.
They stressed that “if the NCA and the MNOs fail to heed these demands, we shall, starting Tuesday, 8th February, 2022, begin the first of a series of planned boycotts until the rights of customers to be treated with dignity, are respected.”
Other members who signed the release are Kofi Kakraba Pratt, Dr. Kwesi Owusu, James Afedo, Selorm Branttie, Francis Kofi Korankye-Sakyi, Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, Kwame Mfodwo and Michael Ofori-Akuffo.
SOURCE: DAILY MAIL GH with additional files from myjoyonline.com
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