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Fifteen million Ghanaians are expected to be issued with their national identification cards or Ghanacards by November 1, next year, the Executive Secretary of the National Identification Authority (NIA), Dr Josiah Cobbah, has announced. Described as the expanded project, Dr Cobbah said the project will be executed under a Public Private Partnership (PPP). He was speaking at a news conference in Accra yesterday to explain some new developments regarding the status of the registration and the issuance of cards to Ghanaians. He said the project would allow for the instant issuance of multi-functional smart identity cards with a chip memory size of 120K which would again be segmented and issued to various institutions to run their applications on the same card instead of issuing multiple cards. Additionally, he said the Ghana card had been designed to assist �our compatriots with visual challenges to be able to use it using a tactile feature on the card�. �Thus the expanded scope, together with the specifications of the system, will enable the NIA to meet the biometric data requirements of all the user agencies. Technology changes and we must change with technology if we are to achieve our statutory mandate,� he said. Operationally, Dr Cobbah said partners of the project had agreed on a technical and operational system that had been designed and financed by the private partner, Identity Management Systems (IMS) Limited. The $115 million Chinese Facility On the issue of funds, Dr Cobbah said a $115 million Chinese concession facility would be applied to a re-scoped engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract designed for the NIA ecosystem. He said the facility would also help to establish regional and zonal offices, develop a disaster recovery centre outside the headquarters, establish a biometric institute to be affiliated to a public university, procure mobile registration vans, among other initiatives. He said currently, the NIA owed temporary workers who were engaged for the mass registration exercise in the Northern Region to the tune of GH�1 million. �We think that given our funding challenges, the PPP is the appropriate method that will work for Ghanaians,� he said. However, some staff of the NIA had raised concerns over the operations of the NIA in an 11-point statement distributed to media personnel at the press conference. Titled, �Questions on the Truth NIA is Hiding�, the statement alleged that some members of the current management of the NIA were bent on throwing away the wisdom of establishing the institution and entrusting its security operations into the hands of a few private people, some of whom were not Ghanaians. Some of these allegations included the authority�s inability to clear an equipment at the port which had been given free of charge by Morpho, a company with specialty in security solutions, the engagement of Stratcom Africa as a consultant on the project, the faulty air conditioners in the card printing section of the NIA, among others. However, Mr Cobbah was quick to explain that the hardware that was given to the authority by Morpho was the size of a printer and the authority also had no money to clear it.