Embassies may soon request a digital address for visa applications – suggests Bawumia

General News on Thursday, November 29, 2018

Source: citinewsroom.com

2018-11-29

Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia suggested that embbadies operating in Ghana could soon request digital addresses from Ghanaian visa applicants.

Although it is not yet a government policy or directive of the embbadies, Mr. Bawumia think that this could become a reality.

Mr. Bawumia made the remarks at the opening statement at the second Stakeholder Conference on "Leveraging Economic Diplomacy for Ghana's Industrialization Agenda".

While stressing the importance of the address system, Bawumia said embbadies would be able to better badess the credibility of visa applications in the future if they made digital addresses a requirement.

"The digital address is more and more necessary for you to sign up for SSNIT or a national ID. If you do not have your digital address, you will not be able to register for a national identity. We will use it and I am sure that even the embbadies here will increasingly need the national numerical address of anyone applying for a visa so that you know exactly when to apply for a visa. Visa. "

Already, visa applicants who fill out forms provide the addresses of their homes.

The Vice President's comments come a few weeks after the researcher and Policy Think Tank Vice President, IMANI Africa, Bright Simons, suggested that the requirement for a digital address for the authority National Registration (NIA) for the registration and issuance of Ghana map did not seem to have been well thought out.

Mr. Simons believes that the NIA may not have taken into account the housing dynamics in the country before making the digital address a prerequisite for registering and issuing the Ghana card.

In a Facebook post, he said more than 120,000 homeless Ghanaians living in Accra would be denied card issuance due to the NIA's digital address requirements.

"There are about 120,000 homeless people in Accra alone. And about 5.4 million slum dwellers in Ghana. Most of these people do not have "fixed address". How then do you link a national identification system to an untested "digital address"? Do these policymakers understand their own country? Asked Bright Simons.

A few weeks ago, Francis Kojo Kwarteng Arthur, a private lawyer, also sued the NIA for demanding a digital identity document, claiming that the requirement was illegal and had to be removed from the catalog of requirements.

In an interview with Citi News, Kwarteng's attorney Arthur said his research showed that there was no regulation in Ghana's Post and Courier law recognizing the system. Numerical addressing.

"The digital address code is powered by GhanaPost, so I read the law and regulations on Ghana Post and Mail Services, and nothing made it possible to make the code of 39, digital address in Ghana. I am a lawyer and I refuse, so what about the ordinary person on the street? I decided to test it in court. My readings show me that there is no act that makes the digital address code operational; I want the court to declare that the digital address code is illegal; therefore, Ghanaian citizens wishing to attend the NIA should not be denied to Ghana. card on the basis of not having the numerical address code, "he said.