NCC Looks Elsewhere as Sale of Preregistered Sim Cards Booms

The over N6.1 billion poured into the ongoing Sim card registration is going down the drains with fresh evidences suggesting ready availability of preregistered Sim cards at every nooks and corners of the country  Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations have found.

Preregistered Sim cards are those in which the biometric identity of a different person is used to register the number of Sim cards, and then sold to different people such that identity of the user is not same with the one who registered the Sim.

The implication is that armed robbers; kidnappers and other criminals can buy these cards and hide under the anonymity they provide to perpetuate heinous crimes.

Checks around the country revealed that the trade is booming with a preregistered Sim card selling for as much as N1, 500. A fresh Sim card from any GSM operator cost just N200.

Even with the best efforts of Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the trade is assuming the nature of organized crime with a chain that extends as far as the major dealers who purchase Sim cards in bulk to the hawkers on the streets and to gang kingpins.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the federal government had embarked on the Sim card registration because of the increasing wave of crimes assisted by telecommunications as criminals hide under the anonymity of telephone access to commit crimes such as kidnapping and robbery.

The rationale is that if the owner of each SIM card in the country is known, it would be easy to trace any crime committed with the aid of a phone to a person.

Further checks showed that some unsuspecting poor Nigerians were being used to register such Sim cards in large quantities.

The government voted a questionable N6.1 billion for the registration even when the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) undertook similar registration of all bank account holders in Nigeria without any special budget.

But there are series of scandals surrounding the handling of the money meant for the exercise which the NCC is fighting to absolve itself of any wrongdoing.

Critics said that whatever the benefit of preregistration is, that the government lack capacity to take advantage of it or to protect the citizens.

They said that the Sim registration process is too disorganized to make any meaningful impact and blamed the government for not doing enough to educate Nigerians on the dangers of preregistered Sim cards.

Bola Olubodun, a security expert , said, that process have been compromised because vital information of some Nigerian subscribers are now available to fraudsters and crooks of all kinds.

Tony Ojobo, director, Public Affairs at NCC, however, told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that the process is achieving its objectives.

He said that the constitutional way of fighting illegality is through the use of law enforcement agencies which the commission has been using.

According to him, some vendors of preregistered Sim cards have been arrested and enjoined Nigerians to report to the Nigerian Police any vendor of preregistered Sim card.

Deolu Ogunbanjo, president, National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMs) however urged Nigerians to trust the system.

“ The law states that you have to register your Sim card, anybody going outside that is going contrary to the dictates of the law and should be made to face the wrath of the law” he added.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek recalled that the Sim card registration exercise  begun in February 2011 when the Nigerian Communications Commission signed contract with seven registration service providers to handle the registration process in different parts of the country along with telecommunications operators.

The contractors included SW Global for the South-East region — Anambra, Enugu, Abia, Ebonyi, and Imo; PNN for the North-Central region — Abuja, Plateau, Benue, Niger, Kogi, Kwara and Nassarawa; Chams for Lagos; and JKK for the South-West region – Oyo, Osun, Ogun, Ekiti and Ondo.

Others were DATAGROUPIT for the North-East region — Yobe, Borno, Gombe, Bauchi, Adamawa and Taraba; EAGLE/CBC for the North West region — Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Kano and Jigawa; and E-Kenneth/SageMetrics for the South-South — Cross River, Delta, Edo, Akwa Ibom, Rivers and Bayelsa.

Since March 28, 2011 that the Sim card registration actually began, many issues had been thrown up.

But desperate to justify the process, Ojobo, who was a guest at a television programme in Lagos, said that the verification process had commenced and would be preceded by number portability, which is designed to empower GSM subscribers to switch to a different network provider while still maintaining the same phone number.

He said that the Sim registration exercise is taking time to close because “After the digital collection of the database, the process of harmonising and cleansing was begun. The numbers of SIM card that were initially collected was 100 million, at a time when the active subscription was about 97million.

“Because of this volume, caused by multiple cases of double registration, the operators found the process of collation tough, and it took a long while for them to upload the information to NCC backings. When this was done, we also discovered mismatching, and the process continued” he added.