NIA's US$115 million loan for private pocket

-As IMS boss is fingered for manipulating the NIA

-US$100,000 kickback used to glean privileged information

The National Identification Authority’s (NIA) plan to secure a US$115 million loan from the Chinese Exim Bank is a carefully crafted scam between a few people within the authority and Identity Management System (IMS) Limited- the company contracted to issue national identity cards to 15 million Ghanaians, staff and insiders at the NIA have alerted.

The reasons cited by NIA for sourcing the controversial US$115 million was because it claimed it needed an ‘integrated system upgrade’ to change its obsolete equipment to more modern ones, after which it will re-register the over 15 million Ghanaians which it had already registered.

A substantial part of the contract has been penned down by the NIA to be handed over to IMS whose initial contract was to register only resident non-Ghanaian citizens under the National Identification System (NIS).

IMS had barely completed a tenth of the foreign registration than it was handed a second contract to register 15 million Ghanaians- a role that was the sole obligation of the NIA.

Some staff of the NIA- referring to themselves as Concerned Staff of the National Identification Authority- comprising of some lower management executives, indicated in a press statement released to some media houses that the whole process is a scam.

The Republic newspaper has gathered that there was behind-the-scenes manipulations aimed at benefitting IMS, a company headed by Moses Baiden, who is alleged to be part of the trio (“Upper Management/Senate”) running affairs at NIA.

All along, NIA’s private partner (IMS), who’s CEO Moses Baiden had “good rapport” with NIA’s top management, was allegedly given access to privileged information to make it easy to secure the contract, an insider told this newspaper.

According to the insider, the Chairman of NIA’s Advisory Board, one Professor Appiah Aidoo, allegedly gave all necessary information to Moses Aidoo in return for a US$100,000 kickback.

The NIA is allegedly being run by a close-knit trio of the Executive Secretary of the NIA, Dr. Josiah Cobbah, one Joseph Irokko, Director of Administration/Legal the NIA and Mr. Baiden.

The NIA has estimated that it would cost approximately US$300 million to register 15 million Ghanaians under the NIS, but IMS has allegedly failed to show any proof of how it is going to be able to raise an amount of $145m which is required to provide as part of the $300million the 15 million citizens’ registration project is expected to gulp.

Interestingly, the NIA which claims it is under-resourced; forcing it into public-private partnership, is expected to raise the bigger chunk of the funds of $155m while the private partner contends with US$145 million.

According to the Concerned Staff, the $155m constitutes the controversial $115 China Exim facility the state has to pay for, the World Bank $21m to NIA and an alleged loan facility IMS is forcing the NIA to procure from the Bank of Ghana.

“It is obvious that all these people want to do is hand over these state resources to their private partner IMS to finance the citizens re-registration. The question then is, how can the NIA, which has the experience of registering over 15 million Ghanaians nationwide and distributed over 1 million cards, hand over a 15 million registration contract to a private company which has been able to register only 50,000 foreigners over almost a period of 2 years,” the Concerned Staff stated in their release.

Around 2006, the NIA handed over a juicy contract to French company, Sagem Securite, now known as Safran Morpho (Morpho) to supply the equipment needed to collect data of Ghanaians and help issue national ID cards. Unknown to many people, Morpho sub-contracted the equipment supply to the CEO of IMS, Moses Baiden, who was a major sub-contractor to Sagem.

According to a reliable insider who spoke to the Republic newspaper on condition of anonymity, when the equipment were brought into the country, no Operational Assessment Test was conducted on them. Some of the supposed new equipment were said to have broken down immediately they were installed.

Apparently, Moses Baiden’s company had initially bid for the contract to supply database and equipment to the NIA but lost to Sagem, however, unknown to many people, Moses Baiden was still deeply embedded in Sagem’s scheme of things, being their major sub-contractor in Ghana.

Essentially, the plan was to make the Morpho system look bad so that IMS could be slotted in and given the multi-million dollar contract to register Ghanaian citizens under the NIS, the Concerned Staff alleged.

According to the staff of the embattled NIA, the problems confronting the authority are superficial as they dismissed arguments that the NIA equipment were obsolete and therefore required US$115 million to re-register the more than 15 million Ghanaians already captured their database

According to an intercepted press statement that NIA plans to present on Tuesday October 7th at a specially organized press conference in Accra, “The centralized printing system at NIA designed by Morpho in 2006 has to all intents and purposes become outmoded. For example, it takes only 4 fingers as against the current international trend of ten fingerprints and some aspects do not conform to internationally accepted standards.”

The NIA top management is said to have rejected an offer by Morpho to upgrade the system which is claimed to be obsolete, “The NIA officials claim the current Safran Morpho system is outmoded and so they need to upgrade. Why then have they rejected Morpho’s offer to do the upgrade with the World Bank facility of $21.5million the bank has recently approved for NIA?” The Concerned Staff revealed.

Morpho is said to possess the ten fingerprint system and instant issuance machines that the NIA claims its system lacked.

If they had accepted Morpho’s proposal, the Concerned Staff stated, NIA will not need to discard the current Morpho system that was acquired at a whopping 52million Euros in addition to the Ghc21m used for the mass registration exercise.

“We are still at a loss as to how the Upper Management comprising the Board Chairman, Ag. Executive Secretary (ES) and Head of Administration/Legal managed to convince our Head of Technology to declare the Morpho system useless and bring in another system that is not compatible with the Morpho system,” the group charged.

“We are aware that Morpho has come to diagnose the problem with their system and have sent the parts needed to fix the problem to NIA. But we are told that our Upper Management has declared the Morpho system as scrap and the Executive Secretary [Dr. Cobbah] is on record to have told a management meeting that the arrival of the parts will end the contract with Morpho so that Identity Management System (IMS) will take over the citizens’ registration in addition to the non-citizens one.”

The NIA has received serious public flak when new broke of its intention to source US$115 million from China as funds to re-register Ghanaians who have already been registered in the NIS. Critics saw this as an utter waste, given the fact that over US$20 million had already been sunk into the project.