IMANI Ghana- a Center for Policy and Education, a think tank ranked fifth most influential in Africa (2009) and the only African think tank named in the top 25 most innovative think tanks in the world in 2010 has yet again uncovered a plot by some NDC top guns to milk Ghana in excess of about US$42million.
Making this revelation on his facebook wall, Franklin Cudjoe, the founding Executive Director of?Imani believes that, the National Identification Authority needs salvation from vested interests.
According to him, there are some very troubling emerging facts which implicate the Minister of State at the Presidency, Dr. Mustapha Ahmed.
Cudjoe writes that, Dr. Mustapha is reported to have written to the National Identification Authority (NIA) to stop the registration exercise in the three Northern Regions because the ongoing exercise captures only four finger prints.
This is after the NIA has conducted registration of same in 7 regions out of 10 in the country. The NIA has spent Ghc.2m training 3600 adjunct field staff and 700 students to complete the exercise in the three Northern regions. Registration began last week and was set to continue this week. But this fiat cancels all….
Preliminary investigations reveal that some vested interests are bent on using the now vaunted Public Private Partnership (PPP) policy to impose a US$15m project to capture five finger prints instead of four. The crucial question is would this new bio data project be applied to the rest of the country seeing as the NIA has completed the laborious registration of millions in 7 regions of the country over the last three years, he asks.
He writes that, Foreign Nationals are set to be re-registered again. This is because some vested interests have imposed a self-budgeted US$32m project on the NIA to ensure that 350,000 foreign nationals are re-registered at a new fee of US$ 120 per person. This comes up to US$42m in revenue to the vested interests.
These interests have promised to pay a fee of $2m only to the NIA and have actually advanced $500,000 even before the suspicious project began to the NIA to undertake ONLY PUBLIC EDUCATION ON REGISTERING FOREIGN NATIONALS. And the vested interests only got this project under SOLE-SOURCING. NO COMPETITIVE BIDDING. THEY PROMISED 400 data capturing machines, but has since delivered 60, yet they claim they have invested $32m so far in the project.
NATIONAL IDENTIFICATION AUTHORITY’S RESPONSE TO MINISTER ON THE LATTER’S REQUEST TO CANCEL MASS REGISTRATION EXERCISE IN THE THREE NORTHERN REGIONS
ISSUES CONNECTED TO CANCELLATION OF MASS REGISTRATION EXERCISE IN THE NORTHERN REGION
- Cancellation will lead to a high political cost.
- Sudden demobilization of community sensitization and engagement activities
- Sudden termination of commitments?and agreements
- Public disaffection and outcry
- Perception that government is not interested in the development of the three northern regions of which the NIS is a crucial part, after the long delay in implementation
- Cancellation will lead to a high economic and social cost to the State
- Sunken cost of already implemented activities running into hundreds of thousands Ghana cedis
- Termination of public mobilization effort
- Cost of demobilization of logistics and personnel in Phase One Operations (transportation of materials MRWs and Accessories, Paperware, Generators, Etc. and registration personnel also running into hundreds of thousands Ghana cedis.
- Additional Cost of remobilization in the future (training and deployment costs)
- The non-inclusion of personal data of registrable population of the three northern regions in the national database.
