Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia has vehemently defended his controversial remark about preferring the Ghana Card over a thousand interchanges.He said this at the Accra Business School today,He stated that the reason for his earlier statement of the Ghana Card more beneficial that 1000 interchange is the enormous value the nation will read because of this National identification cards
“We have implemented a national identification system and today we have 16 million Ghanaians with unique identities and that is a major transformation. And sometimes a lot of people don’t even appreciate what the impact of the Ghana Card is.But if you gave me 1,000 interchanges and a Ghana Card, I will choose the Ghana Card because it is more impactful,” Dr Bawumia stated
He proceeded to quizzed his sanity by asking “You can imagine the furore it caused with people asking is this man crazy?” and he said he been misrepresented by the Opposition NDC, he justify his comment by adding “ “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 believes that this situation will eliminate ghost names from public payrolls, potentially saving 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.”
According to the Vice President, the Ghana Card number has also become the TIN number for Ghanaians, and it will help integrate databases, improve tax collection, and thus generate more revenue for the country.
These savings, among many other benefits Ghana stands to gain, he insists, informed his comment about preferring a Ghana Card over a thousand interchanges because it will not only save the country millions of cedis, but will also help cut back on corrupt practices.
He made the clarification today at the Civil Service Awards ceremony.
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