The Ghana Card: Balancing Innovation and Practicality is a National Imperative

On September 1st, 2024, the Ghanaian community in Ottawa, Canada, had the opportunity to engage with a delegation from the National Identification Authority (NIA) and their technical partner, Identity Management Systems (IMS) – a privately held subsidiary of Margins Group. The forum was organized to discuss the piloting of the exercise to provide Ghanaians living abroad with the National Identity Card (Ghana Card). This is a worthwhile initiative and Ghanaians everywhere hope it succeeds, not only in Ottawa, but across Canada and the world. However, after listening to personnel from the NIA and IMS, it is apparent that the NIA is more focused on producing what they describe as “the most technologically advanced card in Africa, if not the world” at significant expense to the nation, rather than focusing on the practical utility of the card number itself. Also, given that the Ghana Card would exist alongside other Government Issued Identification Documents (GIIDs) such as the passport, NHIS card and driver’s licence, it is problematic, if not irresponsible, for the NIA to continually debase and marginalize these other identification documents.

With the majority of Ghanaians over the age of 18 having now been issued the Ghana Card, there is an effort to push its use to the exclusion of other GIIDs, even for purposes for which simpler and more cost-effective options would suffice. For instance, banks in Ghana now require customers to present the Ghana Card and undergo biometric verification for (in-branch) transactions. Reports have emerged of instances where Ghanaians have been denied service at banks because they presented a passport instead of the Ghana Card. This raises an important question: how is it that one can use a passport or Voter Card to acquire a Ghana Card, yet those same documents are not deemed valid for basic transactions such as banking? This policy inconsistency also sends mixed messages to the international community. On one hand, Ghana’s government expects foreign governments to accept its passports as proof of citizenship and on that basis, grant the holder a visa and passage to/through their countries but domestically, the same passport is deemed insufficient for everyday transactions like withdrawing a few Cedis from the bank. Illogical, isn’t it? What makes this even more absurd is that biometric verification, as offered by the NIA with the support of IMS, does not inherently require the Ghana Card. During a sidebar conversation with a member of the NIA technical team and the COO of IMS (James Koomson), they confirmed that verification simply involves taking fingerprints and checking the NIA database to confirm your name, date of birth, place of birth, etc.; information that is also available on a passport, Voter Card, driver’s licence or any other GIID.

This unnecessary requirement for the use of the Ghana Card extends to tax payments. That is, one needs a Ghana Card and biometric verification to settle a tax bill. In a nation already grappling with low tax compliance, imposing additional barriers for citizens willing to pay their taxes seems counterproductive. What would the government lose if Kwame Mensah walked into a Ghana Revenue Authority office pretending to be Kofi Agyei and offered to settle his tax obligation? Why would the government refuse to take that money? All that is required in this instance is to identify the correct account for the deposit using the Tax Identification Number (or the Ghana Card number if it replaces the TIN as has been proposed) and credit that account accordingly. One should not need the Ghana Card or any form of identification and certainly, no biometric verification, when one is paying money to the government. Of course, if the government is paying out money then confirming the identity of the individual would be crucial. However, this can be done using any GIID and in most jurisdictions, you are required to produce at least two different GIIDs in instances where it is essential to confirm identity. This brings to mind the proposal to allow Ghanaians to be issued passports using only the Ghana Card in the future. This is a bad idea because fraudulent actors who manage to secure Ghana Cards can obtain a passport or other forms of GIIDs without facing further scrutiny. This is one instance where multiple GIIDs should be required; we cannot blindly accept the Ghana Card as “the single source of truth”.

Seriously, why should Ghanaians not be able to use other GIIDs for identification purposes? I had the opportunity to ask the Executive Secretary of the NIA, Kenneth Attafuah, this very question at the forum. While he suggested that this was in a legislation (i.e., L.I. 2111) for which the NIA was not responsible – though it is exactly what the NIA has been advocating – he gave the L.I. his full support and justified it by pointing to cases of impersonation; particularly within the financial sector. He recounted the case of a person who allegedly photoshopped his face onto a digital image of another person’s Ghana Card, presented the altered digital image saved on his phone as proof of his identity and managed to withdraw about GHS 165,000 from the original cardholder’s account. Rather than this being a good reason to insist on biometric verification for simple everyday transactions, this is a clear case of a bank that may have abandoned all security measures meant to prevent fraud through impersonation. The bank should have rejected the digital image of the Ghana Card and used other means to authenticate the identity of the individual including: the use of another GIID (something the law seems not to allow at the moment); the production of his ATM Card along with the PIN; and comparison of his signature on the withdrawal form with that on file. If this story is to be believed, we must also believe that the bank did not do any of these or somehow, the fraudster satisfied all these checks. Yes, signatures can be forged, bank cards can be stolen and PINs obtained through subterfuge but these checks, alone or together, constitute a relatively low cost approach to preventing impersonation for most bank transactions.

In any case, according to the most recent fraud report on the financial sector by the Bank of Ghana (Banks, SDIs & PSPs 2023 Fraud Report), fraud through impersonation accounts for only 0.9% (GHS 674,000 out of GHS 72 million) of the total amount of funds lost through fraud; only burglary and lending/credit fraud involved lesser amounts. The question therefore is why are banks being pressured to spend considerable amounts of money to supposedly, prevent a type of crime that is not a major source of loss? Even if it were, it is certainly not the responsibility of the NIA or any government agency to dictate the form of identity verification private institutions should use to prevent fraud. More so when they would have to pay for the service - a cost that would inevitably be passed on to clients. A decision as to which losses a bank would absorb should be left to its management. If a bank has faith in its ATM cards and wants to use only that to confirm people’s identity, so be it.

The National Identification exercise has spanned several decades and regimes with significant progress being made in the last few years under the current NPP government and the leadership of Attafuah. Unfortunately, this success has emboldened the NIA to push for laws and regulations that do not necessarily benefit Ghanaians or the nation. Instead, they seem designed to increase the power and influence of the NIA while also channelling business to its technical partner. This quest for power and influence has sadly been accompanied by a campaign to debase and marginalize all other GIIDs often with the support of the Margins Group. Speaking to a joint parliamentary committee of Subsidiary Legislation and Defence and Interior in March 2024, Margins Group’s Chief Software Development Officer, Andrew Asamoah, hyped the discovery of about 45,000 passports, 130,000 NHIS cards, 45,000 driver’s licenses and 166,000 SSNIT cards that did not exist in the respective institution’s database. He noted that “...we couldn’t detect this in the field because we operate a secure database, the machine can only talk to NIA [and not to the Passport Office, SSNIT, NHIS or DVLA].”

For the Margins Group and the NIA, this was evidence that those GIIDs were unreliable and should be replaced with the Ghana Card as a means of identification and that the issuing institutions should jettison their own databases and instead use the NIA database. The notion that the mere existence of fake passports, NHIS cards, etc., somehow make these GIIDs unreliable is absurd. The U.S. dollar is used extensively around the world despite the fact that it is the most counterfeited currency in the world and no one would suggest that it should be abandoned for that reason. The fact of the matter is documents are counterfeited all the time as evidenced by recent stories of people using counterfeit Ghana Cards. It is for this reason that features are included in sensitive documents not only to make them difficult to counterfeit but also easy for fake ones to be detected. If NIA accepted all these fake documents, it was because it had not trained its workers to detect fake versions of these documents and not because these documents are inherently unreliable.

Perhaps the most farcical aspect of this campaign against other GIIDs is the promotion by the NIA (and the NPP government; especially its current presidential candidate) of the Ghana Card as an E-Passport that Ghanaians in the diaspora can use to travel to Ghana without a visa despite statements from ICAO to the contrary. This is curious since Ghanaians have always been able to travel to Ghana without a visa using only a Ghanaian passport or a foreign passport in conjunction with a Dual Citizenship card. Even if we were to accept the NIA’s position, what is the point of expending resources to put an E-Passport in the hands of every Ghanaian when less than 10% (and I am being generous here) of the population will ever travel outside the country? These extra features being incorporated into the Ghana Card at extra cost to the nation ultimately benefits a private company with little added value to the nation as a whole.

Sadly, instead of the other government agencies pushing back against these false narratives, they have rather become either silent or vocal accomplices. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration (the Passport Office to be precise) has said nothing about these E-Passport claims. On the other hand, the Electoral Commission, whose Voter Card was the defacto national identity card for most of the over three decades of the Fourth Republic, now claims that its method of registering Ghanaians is inferior to the NIA’s even though they are virtually identical and in fact, most Ghanaians used a Voter Card as proof of citizenship when they registered for the Ghana Card.

Many organizations use contractors for support in areas where they lack in-house expertise. Over time, a successful contractor may be mistakenly viewed as a partner with shared goals, which can lead the organization to rely on the contractor for not only the attainment of their objectives but also the definition of those objectives. This trust can allow a contractor – motivated by profits – to propose solutions that benefit them financially but may exceed the organization's needs. When public institutions fall into this trap, it results in higher costs to the nation and its citizens. This seems to be the case with the relationship between the NIA and IMS, where certain technical features of the card and the regulations associated with its use serve to enrich IMS rather than benefit the nation or its people. In our efforts to improve our identification systems, we must ensure we do not complicate everyday transactions. We cannot build a regime where biometric verification is the only way to confirm identity, especially when a private company profits unnecessarily from it. Multiple GIIDs and options for identity verification should remain available for the benefit of all Ghanaians.

By Dr. Yaw Asiedu, Ottawa, Canada

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