The government of Ghana, through the Central Bank, in 2008 deployed a national electronic payment platform, christened e-zwich, in its bid to reduce cash handlings, ensure personal safety in payment systems, and to eliminate inflationary price rounding-up practices, as is fast becoming the global trend.

Primarily, the platform was designed to promote seamless banking and financial services to all Ghanaians.

The Central Bank was optimistic that the project would be a major transformer of the financial system, because it would rope a lot more people into the banking sector, above the estimated 20 per cent of the population currently in the banking sector.

Some financial analysts even suggested that this huge technological infrastructure could be used to restore some amount of sanity in public sector pay systems, as the platform could be used to store all fingerprints of public sector workers electronically.

The euphoria generated from the onset, witnessed mass e-zwich registration exercises across the country.

However, some few years down the line, the objectives of the deployment of the system seems to be fast dwindling, due to the numerous challenges affecting easy access to e-zwich services, which has eventually turned the all-important biometric smart cards into mere plastic objects in the hands of those who have it.

Many of the challenges have come as a result of the difficulty in getting access to point of sale (POS) devices, and the frequent challenges faced during the biometric authentication that are required to establish peoples' identities, before they can use the card, and many others.

These challenges seem to be fast defeating the objectives for which such a capital intensive system was deployed by the Bank of Ghana.

Certainly, such an important project, into which so much has been invested, cannot be left to go down the drain, as indications are pointing to.

It is, however, gratifying to know that the managers of the system are coming to terms with the fact that the system is not working to expectations, and needs a change in strategy, to make it gain wider acceptance and patronage.

The General Manager in-charge of Project and Business Development at GhIPSS, Archie Hesse, has been reported as saying that merchants would be offered flexible terms to acquire point of sale devices, which they complain are too expensive, while some strategic institutions like the education sector have been earmarked to install the POS free of charge for a year.

The earlier the mangers of the system changed this strategy, to drum home the concept and make it workable to the ordinary man on the street, the better it would be for the system, so that it does not become yet another white elephant project, as Ghanaians would one day demand accountability for the project.