“The Ghana Card? We started conversations about it years before my friend Dr. Bawumia became Vice-President. I remember Herman Chinery Hesse introducing Moses Baiden, the MD of Margins, to me during Kufuor’s tenure as the person with the best identity management system for handling our ID cards. Sadly, the Kufuor government preferred some unreliable Europeans who couldn’t deliver—partly due to funding issues. Then politics took over. The NDC won the 2008 elections, and a lot changed.
IMANI virtually battled the NIA during the Atta Mills administration to push for the right thing. Mass registrations for ID cards were held in all regions except the then three northern regions.
Apparently, an “improved” technology—one that captured all five fingers instead of the three or four fingers previously captured in the other seven regions—had been “discovered.” Sadly, the claim was that all the data collected from millions of Ghanaians in those seven regions wasn’t worthy of a national ID system. I remember Moses Baiden and Herman telling me that we could still use the data collected to process authentic IDs, but it all fell on deaf ears at the NIA board at the time. Moses Baiden struggled, but he persevered. I would later be part of a private sector sounding board at the Danish Embassy, alongside Patrick Awuah and Elizabeth Villars, that approved some initial funding for the private company, Margins, to continue his card business during President Mahama’s first term.
Then came the NPP under Nana and Bawumia. The NPP abandoned the data collected from the seven regions. They procured technology that captured five fingers. Margins helped through an arrangement with the NIA, and Ghana had to register all over again for ID cards.
So you see, much happened with our ID cards years before Bawumia became Vice-President. He promoted the card, but he didn’t initiate it, nor did he invent it. Please, enough already ….Happy Eid!”
