The Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) has accused operators of the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) of not complying with its directive to deactivate all unregistered subscriber identity modules (SIMs). Also to be deactivated are those that suffered one irregularity or the other in the course of SIM card registration.
The NCC has threatened to sanction the telcos.
According to the NCC, from about 38.78 million SIM cards found to be defective in terms of improper registration details, including poor finger prints, no facial information and other biometric challenges, only about 10.7 million have been deactivated.
Its Head, Compliance and Monitoring Team, Efosa Efosa, who spoke with reporters in Lagos yesterday, said all the operators failed to comply with the directive on the deactivation of improperly registered SIM cards.
He accused MTN, the dominant operator, of failing to comply with the directive, while Airtel, Globacom, and Etisalat partially complied, he said.
The chief enforcer recalled that in September last year, NCC sent 38.78 million subscriber lines that had registration hiccups to the telcos and directed them to normalise the registration by re-registering the affected subscribers.
In the figures, MTN had 18.6 million unregistered and improperly registered SIMs, Airtel had 7.49 million, Globacom-2.23 million, while Etisalat had 10.46 million, totaling 38. 78 million SIMs that had issues.
Early this month, specifically on August 4, NCC gave telcos, a seven-day ultimatum to deactivate all unregistered and improperly registered SIM cards on their networks.
The NCC monitoring team carried out unannounced monitoring on all the networks and discovered that there was partial compliance among the operators while MTN did not comply at all.
Efosa lamented that instead of outright deactivation MTN only placed 1.6 million lines on ‘Receive Calls Only’.
“With this, there was no compliance from MTN. During our visit to Airtel, the telco has fully barred 2.3 million from its network. These were SIM data found to be incomplete. At Globacom, 3.5 million lines have been barred. Globacom gave assurance of 24 hours to deactivate other lines found to be defective. Etisalat barred 3.3 million lines and promised that within 24 hours, others will be deactivated totally from the networks.”
Efosa lamented that the defective lines had been sent to the telcos since September last year, adding that the lines must have now passed 38.78 million.
He said the commission, after due consultation with the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) and other stakeholders in the industry agreed that pre-registered SIMs and others found to be defective be deactivated, adding that henceforth, operators will be required to send correct data for hamonisation to the Efosa, who ruled out sabotage on the part of the operators, informed that there will be sanctions as stipulated by SIM Card Registration Code, Section 19 to 21, where it was stated that per SIMs found defective on the network, erring operator will be made to pay N200, 000.
“We are going to look at what the law says about none-compliance and impose the appropriate sanction on all the operators, according to the level of their offenses,” Idehen said.
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