War on Cash: Nigeria and Ghana Experiment with Cashless System

Governments and banksters have been trying their darn best to put the savings of their constituencies on their palms.

African nations of Nigeria and Ghana will be experimenting with cashless transactions.

The Nigerian program from theNextweb.com

Last week at the World Economic Forum on Africa held in Cape Town, South Africa the Nigerian National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) and MasterCard announced their collaboration with plans to roll-out an initial 13 million MasterCard-branded National Identity Smart Cards with electronic payment capability.

The 13 million cards will form part of a pilot program which will see the West African country’s citizens who are 16 years and older and those who have been residents in Nigeria for more than two years being issued with the new National Identity Smart Cards.

This announcement by Nigeria sees it following in South Africa’s footsteps as the country’s Department of Home Affairs has announced that it intends starting to issue smart ID cards to citizens starting in July, 2013 at a rate of  3 million smart ID cards a year.

It is hoped in both cases that the smart ID cards will help curb the prevalent fabrication of false identity documents in both Nigeria and South Africa as they will be embedded with microchips and with the South African smart ID cards being reported to incorporate biometric features that will also prevent identity theft as a result of the fraudulent use of a stolen or lost smart ID card.

There is also a notable difference between the South African and Nigerian smart ID cards with the West African country’s smart ID cards coming with immediate payment capability’s courtesy of MasterCard’s prepaid payment technology. The cards are also reported to come loaded with 12 other applications.

The cashless project in Ghana from the spyghana.com

Ghana, as a developing country in West Africa has taken the initiative to introduce a system where businesses can be done without using physical cash. Bank of Ghana, the regulator of the banking industry through Ghana Interbank, Payment and Settlement Systems (GhiPPS) introduced e-zwich card, where Ghanaians will feel comfortable in using the card to transact businesses rather than physical cash.

Even though there has been several effort to educate the masses about the product, the education on this e-zwich have not go well with many Ghanaians. A lot of the citizens as of today do not even know there is something called e-zwich card. With a population more than half of it been illiterate, there must be a thorough education where all Ghanaians will understand and use the platform.

In Ghana, some of the common cards we can identify are such as Sika Card by SSB, Visa Horizon by Standard Chartered Bank (Stored Value cards), deployment of Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and ATM cards by banks eCard (CAL Bank, Ecobank) and among others.

Harmless they all seem. But centralization means that people's lives will increasingly be subject to government control. Identity cards can be easily altered, changed or subjected to manipulations upon government's whim. These will be like sci-fi movies where people's identities can be wiped out or expunged through programming: You are alive, but you don't exist says the system

 

This also shows why governments will attack gold, bitcoins and cash, and in their stead promote centralized systems based on national IDs complimented by facilities of digital cash payments systems and other 'flavoring' or "add on" called applications.  Such systems will make confiscations and totalitarianism a cinch.