About ten million telephone lines will be disconnected when telecommunication firms start barring subscribers with unverified National Identity Numbers (NINs) from March 29, 2024.
A directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission mandates telcos to bar lines whose NINs have been submitted but not verified by March 29, 2024, and bar those with less than five lines linked to an unverified NIN by April 15, 2024.
This is a follow-up to the first directive to bar lines without NINs linked to them. About 40 million lines were affected by this first round of disconnection. The new round of disconnections will impact more high-value subscribers and raise the number of total disconnected lines in the country to 50 million.
Gbenga Adebayo, president of the Association of Licensed Telecoms Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), disclosed this on Thursday.
“I don’t have a cumulative figure as we speak, but it will be safe to say that by the time we add these numbers to the disconnection bucket, we will go more than 40 million; it might be nearing the 50 million mark,” he said. “The reality is that the people who will be disconnected now will have more impact than the first set.”
The president of the telco umbrella body explained that affected subscribers are those who have submitted their NIN but have not been verified. “It means that you may have some very active subscribers who, in their way, have done what they think is everything they should do, but their lines may still be disconnected because NINs have not been verified with their SIM records,” Adebayo explained.
The new set of affected subscribers will likely suffer disconnections because the information they gave during their SIM registration differs from that on their NIN.
“The problem we are seeing is that people have done SIM Reg at a different time, gave a particular name, and at NIN, gave another name,” Adebayo highlighted.
Linking a telephone line to a NIN aims to prevent the potential misuse of SIM cards for illicit activities and boost security in the country.
Despite calls for the postponement of the SIM-NIN linkage deadline, the NCC has insisted that it does not intend to review its deadlines. According to reports, the NCC wants to clamp down on multiple SIM cards with unverified NIN details.
Quoting a NCC source, the report read, “We have instances where a single individual has over 10,000 lines linked to his NIN. In some cases, we have seen a single person with 1,000 lines, some 3,000 plus lines. What are they doing with these lines?
“From our interim findings, the owners of these lines did not purchase them for decent purposes or to undertake legitimate activities.”
