A Deputy Director of IT and Elections for the opposition NDC, Wisdom Yayra Koku Deku has chastised Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia for claiming glory for the Ghana Card project that has given Ghanaians a unique identity.
The former Head of Systems at the National Identification Authority challenged the vice president who is also the leader of the governing NPP to prove to Ghanaians how he initiated the identification project.
In an interview on Dwaboase programme on TV XYZ/Power FM, Yayra Koku explained that the Ghana Card project was initiated by the John Kufuor administration in 2008 and was continued by the Mills-Mahama administration, stressing that Bawumia was being dishonest claiming credit for the project.
“In 2008, we started to pilot the project under former President Kufuor. We started from the Central region and then to other regions where we registered Ghanaians and took their bio data,” he narrated while emphasizing that cards were not issued until the NDC came to power before the NIA begun issuing cards in the Greater Accra Region.
“In fact the NDC came to continue the project. In Greater Accra, we registered about 3 million people but we were able to distribute 900,000 because at the time, most of the people had migrated, ” he told host Kwame Minkah in Akan.
” How can Bawumia claim credit for a project that was launched in 2008… The NPP only took over from where the NDC left the project, ” he added.
His comment comes after Vice President Bawumia touted the project and attributed it to his hard work.
But Yayra Koku, reacting to the comment urged Ghanaians to disregard Bawumia, labeling him as a dishonest man.
Recently, Yayra Koku to to his X page to challenge the Vice president.
He recounted how Dr Bawumia paid a visit to NIA in 2017 with the current NCA Boss Mr Anokye and some CEOs and how, as the Head of Systems at the time, he took the vice president and his entourage through the NIA systems.
Attaching a picture of him and the entourage, explaining the systems the NIA had in place, he said he explained how the NIA at the time was transitioning from the “old centralised system, which only captured two fingerprints, to a new system that will capture all ten fingerprints of an applicant, Iris, phone numbers for SIM registration, and issue cards immediately.”
He continued, ” As part of my briefing, I informed Dr. Bawumia and his team that we needed to transition to instant issuance printing because the previous system was expensive because it was centralised printing. That is, we register Ghanaians, bring their data to the NIA office, process it, print it, and return to the field to distribute it to applicants.”
He said with the new system, cards would be issued immediately.
“Again, I informed Dr. Bawumia and his team that the old system, which had approximately 16 million Ghanaians’ data, had been successfully migrated to the new system. This is to ensure data consistency and integrity. That is why if you register now and change your Date of Birth, and it does not match what you registered with in the previous system, it will be flagged for investigation,” Deku said.
He continued, ” Dr. Bawumia and his team were informed that the new system had completed the Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) in December 2016 and was now ready for the final acceptance test, the Site Acceptance Test (SAT), prior to its launch. Dr. Bawumia and his team were also informed that the new system is a public-private partnership (PPP) between Margins Group and the NIA, with the first contract to pilot instant card issuance completed in 2013 as part of the FIMS project.”
Yayra Koku stated that it was surprising that Dr. Bawumia, in his lecture recently took credit for the new system while condemning the previous government for doing nothing.
According to him, the new system was in place before the NPP came to office.
“The only thing they [the NPP] have added is the Digital address field on the forms. That was even done wrongly, ” he added.
Source: Myxyzonline.com
