NHIS Biometric Registration Is A Waste Of Tax Payer’s Money

The Progressive People's Party is disappointed in the management of the NHIS for announcing the commencement of the biometric registration of NHIS subscribers. In a statement issued by the Public Affairs Directorate of the Authority it was stated that the pilot registration would be followed by a nation-wide scale-up of the exercise. According to the statement, the key objectives for implementing the Biometric Solution are preventing duplicate records and to implement an effective verification (authentication) system at the point of healthcare service delivery.

We strongly submit that the biometric registration exercise amounts to duplication and by extension a waste of the tax payers' money. It demonstrates lack of coordination in public policy decision-making and causing financial loss to the State. The basis for this position of the PPP is that the State had already invested millions of dollars to have all Ghanaians of six years old and above biometrically registered under the National Identification System. The NIA project is not only to establish a National Register which will serve as a single source of credible population related data for national development, but it is to provide a key transformational platform for integrating and redefining public and private sector service delivery approaches. It was to create a central database of all Ghanaians with unique National Identification Numbers for the easy and effective identification in the utilization of public services.

It is the expectation of the PPP that in the interest of effective coordination and judicious use of our scare resource the NHIS would take full advantage of the database of the NIA to achieve the same objective of properly identifying subscribers of the insurance scheme. There is no need to spend additional resources to generate information which already exist with the NIA. The NIA project was to establish a primary database that allow other institutions of State such as the Electoral Commission, Driver & Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Police Service, Immigration Service, Passport Office, SSNIT, Birth & Death Registry and Commercial Banks to utilize for the purposes of identification.

We humbly appeal to the good offices of the Chairman and Members of the Board of Directors of the NHIA to intervene to halt this biometric registration and collaborate with the NIA for the same information the NHIS seeks to collate. We should all join forces to appeal to the government to let the NIA make the identification exercise see the light of day.

President John Mahama must not allow state institutions to waste our resources in this manner!

We must all be wide Awake!
Divine Nkrumah
National Youth Coordinator
PPP