The Chief Registration Officer at the Births and Deaths Registry says the possession of a birth or death certificate does not necessarily mean that the person involved is a Ghanaian as is commonly perceived.

Mr Pope Kwakuvi-Zagbedeh explained that this erroneous notion had come about because prior to 1969 when it was amended, the Births and Deaths Registration Law automatically granted citizenship to applicants. He was speaking during the turn of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural development at the "Meet the Press" series in Accra. Mr Kwakuvi-Zagbedeh said under the new law, the Registry merely records births and deaths that occur in Ghana as stipulated by UN Regulations on Vital Events, for the socio-economic development planning of the country.

He said the community-based registration programme scheduled to take off this year has been postponed to next year because of the 2000 census from which lessons would be learnt to improve upon the operational strategy of the innovation. Under the programme, each member of the 16,000 unit committees countrywide would be trained to record the "socio-economic characteristics of every community on a continuous basis."

The Registry was able to cover 58.3 per cent of births and 25.3 of deaths last year. He said the new programme would facilitate timely recording, improve coverage and provide up-to-date data on changes in the population. He said should the programme take off, the recorded data could be made available to the Electoral Commission to assist it to update the voters' register. Mr Kwakuvi-Zagbedeh expressed regret that relatives of deceased persons do not attach importance to death certificates because they do not see their immediate use as opposed to birth certificates, which they could use to acquire lots of things, including citizenship. Death certificates, he noted, are also important for letters of administration for inheriting property and to ascertain the cause of death in order to save living relatives from dying by the same cause. Mr Kwakuvi-Zagbedeh gave the assurance that the Registry has records on deaths dating back to 1888 and births that go back to 1912 "so whatever your claim is can be dealt with".