Nonye was on her way home Thursday evening around Yaba, in Lagos when she was attacked by four men, one wielding a cutlass. They collected her phone, wallet, ATM cards, and even yanked off her necklace leaving bruise marks.
The next day, she succeeded in blocking her ATM cards, but only after her bank balances have been emptied. Then she went to her network provider to retrieve her SIM card and was told the Federal Government has banned SIM retrieval due to the National Identity Number (NIN) registration.
“My mental state is a huge mess right now,” she writes on Twitter. “I have cried from frustration, anger, and pain. I don’t know what to do. I feel so helpless.”
Nonye’s experience is only one among hundreds of Nigerians whose lives have been upended by the decision by Isa Pantami, minister of technology and digital economy compelling Nigerians under the pain of losing their phone numbers, to register their SIM cards in a matter of weeks, when previous efforts have failed since 2007.
In December 2019, the Federal Government ordered the suspension of the sale and registration of new SIM cards by network operators and followed it with an instruction to telecom operators to block subscribers who do not have the government NIN the next week.
Available data indicated that it is possible over 100million of Nigerians may not have a NIN, that millions have incomplete registration, that the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) only has a capacity to register only 500,000 people monthly as it was ill-equipped, understaffed, and poorly motivated, and that several small businesses will be impacted by the ludicrous directive from the minister, yet the government proceeded with a determination that bordered on mania.
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Nigerians warned the Minister and the sector regulator the Nigerian Communications Commission led by Umar Garba Danbatta, that this regulation was poorly conceived considering that the country was dealing with a second wave of the Coronavirus pandemic and NIMC was unprepared for a massive registration at this time but this was ignored.
Government officials who routinely treat Nigerians with the disdain reserved for a conquered people ignored wise counsel and embarked upon a fruitless registration exercise that is now being blamed for the rising wave of coronavirus in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital with most GSM penetration.
To worsen matters, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) unit of the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASCSN), directed members on Thursday embark on strike over poor welfare package, lack of tools, and risk of exposure to coronavirus.
“The meeting was convened to discuss the state of the exposure of staff members to COVID-19, and the salary structure and its representation in the annual appropriation, and the irregularities in the conduct of promotions, and the personal protection and safety in light of the covid-19 pandemic,” said a communique by ASCSN.
In effect, Pantami and NCC are endangering the lives of Nigerians in a fruitless bid to register SIM cards when NIMC is clearly unprepared to carry out the task. Yet, in a clear draconian and unreasonable way regulations are drawn up by government officials, the purchase of new SIM cards and retrieval of lost ones have been banned.
“We gave this nation to people with the lowest IQ to run,” said a Twitter user, Dire Adesanya, “Pantami just said go and register, he thought our numbers are the comparison of his village population. They don’t have data and even when little data is available their IQ is too abysmal to process the duty of their offices.”
However, the educational accomplishment of the men running the ministry and the NCC seemed to belie this assertion as both Pantami and Danbatta are PhD holders with years of experience in the telecommunication sector. Yet, how they could not see that their plan was illogical and dangerous during a pandemic raises questions about their fitness for office.
At various registration centers, thousands of Nigerians mill around the offices of NIMC waiting to register their numbers but without being attended to. Thousands of others have been exploited by fraudulent NIMC officials who tell them to bring cash before they could be registered.
There are barely 1,000 registration offices to handle the registration of over 100 million Nigerians yet to be enrolled on the government database. A few weeks ago, NIMC was fending off media reports that its database has been hacked with the data of Nigerians auctioned on the dark web.
NIMC officials at registration centers besieged by harried Nigerians are concerned about exposure to COVID-19 as their taskmasters are cooped in their offices unmoored by the threat of a deadly pandemic to their minions. The protective gear issued last week after complaints were donations by the World Bank, an indication of just how unprepared the agency is.
Analysts are urging Pantami and the NCC to transfer the registration of SIM cards to telecom companies who are better equipped and motivated to do it. This was the strategy adopted by the Central Bank when it mandated customers to enroll for a Bank Verification Number. With a vast network of infrastructure, telecom operators have better systems and trained personnel and database used to register customers during the initial SIM registration exercise.
