No Ghana Card; no NSS registration – NSA Director-General declares

The Director-General of the National Service Authority, Felix Gyamfi has declared that prospective graduates without Ghana Card for national service registration will not be enlisted for national service.

According to him, this forms part of plans to scale up efforts to prevent ghost names on the Authority’s payroll.

He made the announcement at a press conference on Thursday, February 13, 2025.

“If you do not have valid Ghana card ID, you will not be allowed into our system. If you are a prospective graduate and you do not have valid Ghana Card to register, you will not be allowed to do national service. So, these are some of the pathways to take away the Ghost names that I have actually discussed,” he said.

Mr. Gyamfi further cautioned that the Authority will henceforth deal with only universities and colleges of education whose accreditations are intact.

The NSA said graduates from tertiary institutions whose accreditation have expired will not be registered for national service.

“So far, we have found out that over 20 of Colleges of Education have expired accreditation from the Ghana Tertiary Education.

“I am using this channel to reach out to the Colleges of Education that they should use the one-week ahead of us including the grace of Friday and the week ahead of us to make sure that their accreditations are restore otherwise we will not allow their graduates to register,” he added.

Over 81,885 suspected ghost names on the payroll of the National Service Authority have been discovered after a recent headcount of active National Service personnel, initiated by the Minister for Finance as a prerequisite for clearing outstanding allowance arrears dating back to August 2024.

The National Investigations Bureau (NIB) has been tasked with uncovering how these fraudulent entries were created under the previous NPP administration.Meanwhile, the Authority believes the scandal stemmed from the failure of leadership to ensure stringent measures to prevent such corrupt act.

Felix Gyamfi noted that the previous management failed to implement the checks and policies initiated to prevent any ghost names on payroll of the NSA.

“This was a leadership problem. This was a situation where the checks that was put in place to save the taxpayers money was supposed to have kicked in and it didn’t kick in,” he lamented.