It is very important that a bold decision is taken to ensure that the basic systems and facilities that obtain in middle class countries are put into place within the next thirty-six months. The basic requirements mentioned above are a reliable national database, a reliable house numbering and street naming system.
Government and various leading figures have decried the lack of a basic national database that should include properly defined house numbers and street names. Some institutions have even gone as far as to dispute national statistics presented by the Government Statistician.
These disputes with statistics would have mattered little if there was a national statistical database. The lack of this very essential institution has led to lots of public money which could otherwise have been used for some developmental activity being allocated to various organizations to carry out basically the same functions but in different ways.
With the increasing interest in Ghana's oil, it is necessary that structures are put in place to ensure the safety and security of the State. A properly constructed national database works station will make citizens data base easier for organizations like the Electoral Commission, the National Identification Authority.
Currently the Electoral Commission is saddled with the task of revising the voters register from time to time with the view to ensure a credible electoral register that would be acceptable to all political organizations. The Commission is talking of biometric registration of voters.
How can a biometric registration exercise be carried put without a reliable and efficient address system. The upgrading from the current voter identification system to the biometric is to still improve upon the electoral register, but how reliable can it be without a reliable address system. Any identification system must necessarily be matched with an efficient street address system for the benefit of the whole country.
The National Identification Authority (NIA) is under the third chief executive since it was established some nine years ago. After a lot of public education campaigns it embarked on a selected registration exercise in 2009 but up till now has not been able to complete a national registration for the 24million people in this country. For those who were captured in the limited registration exercise the plastic identification cards have not yet been given out.
The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) too has been doing its own registration of people for the Scheme. The NHIS has, however, not yet upgraded to the biometric system, but will soon upgrade either out of need or because it is the trend.
Ghana's passport has been upgraded to the biometric system. The registration of births and deaths which falls under Act 301 has also been upgraded to meet international requirements. But the big question is what address system is used in Ghana, because apart from the bio-data of the individual, a reliable address system is a requirement of any biometric identification system.
Both the Passport Office and the Births & Deaths Registry face problems of false claims and since the Passport Office relies on the Ghanaian Birth Certificate to issue a passport to an applicant, it can be concluded that the Passport Office will have the same problem.
The reason for any biometric system which has now been adopted worldwide is the need to be able to identify and trace any individual who has been captured on the system. Tracing involves being able to pin-point locations within a minimum period of time from the last sighting.
It is the ability to trace that is the problem in Ghana. Nigeria with all the supposed ?state of disorder? has a very reliable street and house identification system. Each city in Nigeria has a street map with which a visitor could locate an address. Each segment of any city in Nigeria from Abuja to Zungeru has a post office from which letters are distributed.
The postman delivers letters into mail boxes fixed to houses. In Ghana the Ghana Post is dying slowly to the extent that even the Expedited Mail Service (EMS) has stopped delivering mail and parcels to their addresses. How can this anomaly be resolved without much cost to the tax payer?
Once upon a time in 1969 precisely, as part of preparations for the 1969 Elections, it took just 15 minutes for a voter to acquire a voter identity card with a picture. Today with all the advancement in technology it takes years for almost all the agencies that issue a kind of a photo identity to produce one on application.
In an effort to address some of these issues, it would be necessary to make an effort at establishing one national work station for the capture of biometric information, but the work station should be able to benefit the following organizations that need biometric data to be able to perform their functions properly:-
- The National Population & Housing Census (NPHC)
- The Births & Deaths Registry.
- The Electoral Commission
- The National Identification Authority.
- National Health Insurance Service(NHIS)
The biometric requirements of these organizations and many others can be included in the primary data module in a manner that will make it easy for each organization to extract what it needs.
The Births & Deaths Registry which can play the lead role in data gathering has gone biometric in the issue of Birth and Death certificates. The role of the Birth & Death Registry is important in the creation of a national identification data base.
Government needs to strengthen the Department with both increased personnel; manpower development and equipment to enable them to cover the country more effectively, especially at the community level in conjunction with the unit committee. The Department also requires the use of a biometric finger print reader to eliminate fraud. In addition, the questionnaire that is administered should include the consent of a family head and also the community leader (village chief or odikro). There have been instances in which non-Ghanaians with the support of some Ghanaians have been able to acquire Birth Certificates that say they are Ghanaians.
This would obviously make the acquisition of a birth certificate a little tedious but more efficient. In countries like South Africa, it takes a minimum of two weeks to acquire a Birth Certificate because the Police or security agency must do a check on all the claims one has made .The information gathered by the Births & Deaths Registry can then be fed into the national database.
In fashioning out a system of identification, the role of the Unit Committees under the District Assembly concept is very vital. If the country is well segmented, the Unit Committee will be the first point of call in the quest for any form of identification because that is the establishment supposed to know the people in any particular segment of the country.
The Unit Committees would have to vet applications for Birth/ Death certificates especially pertaining to their house numbers. It might be a slow start, but after sometime a more reliable data-base that includes finger prints and perhaps picture would have emerged to make the work of the national identification much easier.
The benefits of an integrated data-base are as numerous as the beneficiaries and these include the following:-
- Law enforcement agencies whose work will become much easier and more thorough.
- Insurance companies and or social security.
- It will make it easier for utility companies to monitor usage and retrieve costs.
- Financial institutions will improve upon their "Know Your Customer" (KYC) and be able to know whom they are dealing with and also eliminate financial fraud.
- Businesses that deal with the general public in terms of credit.
In order to reduce inter-agency feuds and also overcome budgetary difficulties, it might become necessary to establish one work platform as follows:-
- The National Population and Housing Census, the Births & Deaths Registry, the National Health Insurance Scheme, the National Identification Authority should undertake a onetime registration exercise to establish the raw data that is the basic of any registration exercise. This will make it easier for the registrars to capture all the details of a person such as the biometrics within one sitting. Non-Ghanaians will find it difficult to claim Ghanaian identification because the registration is going to be done at the sub-unit level where everybody is known and any false claim can be challenged. They can, however, get identification under a different category.
Duplicates of all such information collected should be lodged with a national center that will then structure them on regional and district basis for easier assessment the various agencies.
Since the suggestion is based on the use of the sub-units created by the NPHPC, the whole arrangement can be devolved to the unit committee level after the unit committee system has being modified to give it the necessary legal backing. The sub-units can be fed into the GPRS and even telephone calls can indicate the location of the caller.
Once there is a sub-unit system, landlords can then be directed to create rent cards that will be issued to tenants with their particulars and these should be registered at the local unit committee office. Any change of residence should be notified to the last unit committee and registered with the unit committee of the new area.
The system will make it easier for any agency to get appropriate authorization to access information from the National Data Base for a legal activity.
This means every person registered will eventually come out with one national identification card that can be used for the purposes of voting, national identification, national health insurance, etc.
The Driver & Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) for instance can then penalize erring drivers and such people cannot get driving licenses for the duration of the ban.
Banks can easily capture the information on this single card and use the information to confirm a claim.
After a period any person who does not have one can be taken as a visitor to the country and will then be required to go through the process of regularization that will then enable the agencies involved to capture same information into the data base.
Of course there will be technical challenges, which can be surmounted through the creation of a single work station for each group of registrars that will be detailed to each district.
The Ministry of Local Government & Rural Development can then be tasked with managing the area identification based on the coding system of the NPHC and the national Global Positioning System. Street names should be used to honor national heroes. Selected national heroes names can run throughout every regional and district capital.
Foreigners resident in Ghana can be made to pay a token every year for renewal of their resident permits or whatever. This practise obtains in La Cote d?Ivorie, Burkina Faso and other places and there have not been any complaints from sub-regional organizations.
The cost for these work stations can be met from the various budgetary allocations that are made to some of the agencies involved and what can be gotten from the financial and utility companies. Funding for the house numbering and street naming program can be sourced from the financial institutions and the utility companies in the country. After all, they stand to benefit most when it comes to personal identification and recovery of facilities.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Abubakr-Sadiq Braimah
Quelle/Source: AllAfrica, 26.08.2011
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