Why not use one single biometric capture for all
Ghana has a way of making even the simplest task feel like a full adventure. We queue for almost everything. We queue for waakye, we queue for forms, and now we queue for the Ghana Card and the biometric passport. Each place has its own machines and its own officers, and each one wants the same thing from us. Our fingerprints. The same ten fingers that God gave us at birth.
Sometimes I wonder if my fingerprints are more famous than I am.
You capture them for the Ghana Card. You capture them again for the new passport. If you go for another service, they repeat the process with great enthusiasm. You start to feel as if your fingers are being used more than your brain. And while it is amusing at first, the inconvenience begins to sting. The cost also whispers its own painful truth. Transport money, application fees, passport photos, photocopies, and the hours lost from work or home. When you add it all together, the burden falls on the ordinary Ghanaian who is simply trying to follow the rules.
And this is where the confusion becomes impossible to ignore. Ghana already has a biometric database. We have the technology. We have the systems. What we do not have is unity between them. If the institutions could pull from one shared biometric source, we would save time. The nation would save money. And citizens would feel respected instead of exhausted.
One capture. One national storage. One verification point for every agency. That is how a confident and forward-looking country behaves.
If we truly want to reset Ghana and build a nation where life flows with a little more grace, then this issue deserves serious attention. A country cannot progress if its own people are worn out by repetition.
The truth is that we do not need to suffer before we advance. We simply need to organise what we already have.
Because if we keep capturing fingerprints like this, the machines may soon know us better than our families do.
And honestly, I cannot think far.
By Christian Aboagye
