Ghana’s Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has responded to an uproar caused by a statement he made saying he prefers the national identity card to 1,000 interchanges.
Dr Bawumia made the statement when he was speaking at the Accra Business School two weeks ago.
This comment not only members of the National Democratic Congress,( the leading opposition party in Ghana.) have ridiculed but also the general public asserting the need for His Excellency to come to explain himself further.
Addressing participants at the Civil Service Awards ceremony today Bawumia sought to clarify his earlier statement.
“For the first time in the history of our country we have a unique identification system which is biometric and so we can uniquely identify every individual whether they are alive or dead,” he said.
This situation, he believes, will eliminate ghost names from public payrolls and potentially save Ghana millions of cedis.
“So immediately … the case of ghost names on our public sector payroll will become a thing of the past…at National Service Scheme we found 14,000 ghost workers saving annually 114 million Ghana cedis just from one institution because we look for unique identity. Just a couple of days ago SSNIT reported finding 27,000 ghost pensioners and they were being paid 327 million cedis a year.” he added.
The Ghana card number, according to the Vice President, has also become the TIN number for Ghanaians and will help integrate databases and improve tax collection and consequently rake in more revenue for the country.
These savings among many other benefits Ghana stands to gain, he insists.
Bawumia further added that not only will the national identification card save the country millions of cedis, but will also help cut back on corrupt practices.
