Telcos Risk Sanctions for Non-compliance on SIM Card Deactivation
Emma Okonji
All operators of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) will likely face severe sanction from the telecoms industry regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), for failure to comply with the directive given them to deactivate all improperly registered SIM cards on their networks within seven days.
The NCC monitoring team gave the hint in Lagos yesterday, after concluding the monitoring of all the GSM networks for SIM card deactivation compliance.
Addressing journalists after the completion of the monitoring yesterday, Head, Compliance and Monitoring Team at NCC, Mr. Efosa Idehen, said all the operators failed to adhere fully to the directive on the deactivation of improperly registered SIM cards, and are likely to face severe sanctions.
According to Idehen, while Airtel, Globacom, and Etisalat had partial compliance, MTN did not make any attempt to comply.
In September last year, NCC sent a total of 38.78 million subscriber lines that had inconclusive registration to all GSM operators and ordered the operators to rectify the registration by re-registering the subscribers affected.
A breakdown of the figure, shows that MTN had 18.6 million unregistered and improperly registered SIM cards on its network, Airtel had 7.49 million, Globacom had 2.23 million, while Etisalat had 10.46 million, totaling 38. 78 million SIM cards that were not properly registered.
As a follow up, NCC, on August 4, this year, gave all GSM operators, a seven-day ultimatum to deactivate all unregistered and improperly registered SIM cards on their networks.
In order to ascertain the level of compliance across networks, the NCC monitoring team carried out unannounced monitoring on all the networks and discovered that there were partial compliance among the operators, while MTN did not comply at all.
According to Idehen, MTN only placed 1.6 million lines on receive mode, without deactivating the lines that were not properly registered.
He said Airtel partially complied by deactivating 2.3 million lines out of the 7.49 million lines sent to it by NCC, but promised to deactivate the remaining lines soon. Globacom bared 3.5 million lines, but promised to deactivate all unregistered and improperly registered lines from its network, within 24 hours. Etisalat deactivated only 3.3 million lines out of the 10.46 million lines sent to it by the NCC.
Idehen however said the lines were sent to the operators since September last year and that the figure must have surpassed the 38.78 million lines.
“We are going to look at what the law says about noncompliance and impose the appropriate sanction of all the operators, according to the level of their offences,” Idehen said.
Head, SIM Card Registration at NCC, Mr. Bashir Idris, said the directive to deactivate unregistered SIM cards became necessary, following increasing crime rate perpetrated through mobile phones that have poorly registered SIM cards.
The deactivation of SIM cards is also in line with the resolution reached at the meeting with NCC, the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) and industry stakeholders.
Proper registration means a subscriber’s facial pictures, properly captured, biometrics/ finger prints, valid means of identification, address, among others, NCC explained.