The Member of Parliament for Ningo Prampram, Sam Nartey George, is demanding the scrapping of Executive Instrument (E.I.) 63 which compels network operators to provide private user information to state agencies to help in the fight COVID-19.
In line with the Electronic Communications Act, 2008 (Act 775), President Nana Akufo-Addo ordered network service providers to avail the user information to aid the dissemination of information.
But the MP feels the legislation, which was set out in March 2020, “is an illegality” and has outlived its usefulness.
Speaking to Citi News after a Public Accounts Committee hearing on Thursday, which had the Data Protection Commission in attendance, Mr. George, expressed fears that this legislation will be abused ahead of the elections.
“The E.I. opens a new window politically for the government ahead of an election to have unfettered access to the telecom records and mobile financial records of citizens. You can’t, by any stretch of imagination justify this.”
Aside from saying the legislation has outlived its usefulness, the MP also says he is yet to be convinced it helped in the management of the pandemic because the government is “yet to provide evidence that E.I 63 has helped in the fight against COVID.”
“Can anybody point it out to me? Can the Ministry [of Communications] point out to Ghanaians whose telecoms records were tracked using E.I 63?”
“There is no real correlation between our low numbers and whatever successes the government claims to have achieved in the fight against COVID-19 with E.I. 63,” Mr. George insisted.
This legislation was the subject of a lawsuit at the High Court after a citizen sued to prevent the government from accessing his private information from network providers amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Per the Executive Instrument, the network operators are to make available, among others, “all caller and called numbers” to government.
The operators are also to provide the necessary files to the common platform “to facilitate location-based tracking”.
As part of these developments, “any institution designated by the Minister shall establish a central subscriber identity module register.”
Government’s response
The Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, however, said the demands are unfounded.
She stressed that the pandemic is not over.
“Nobody knows when we are going to be out of the woods… so should we relax and go to sleep and say Ghana we are okay and COVID-19 is not a problem?”
On concerns that the government may abuse its power with the legislation, she said critics “creating their own fallacies. ”
“Some people with diabolical minds and devious minds have sat there and conjured up all kinds of fanciful scenarios and assumed everybody thinks like them. We are focused on fighting this pandemic with science and data,” the Minister said.