Senate, NCC Disagree over Irregularities in Sim Card Registration

Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has disagreed with the Senate over alleged irregularities in the just concluded Sim card registration with the Commission insisting that the information available to the upper legislative arm on the registration exercise was not “correct”.

Senator Gilbert Nnaji, chairman, Committee on Communications had at meeting with the Commission in Abuja alleged that the Sim card registration was bedeviled with both “technical and operational” complaints.

Nnaji claimed that such complaints include: non- harmonisation of the Commission’s data with that of the operators; pre-registered Sim cards; money-for-SIM-registration racket; stoppage of face shot capture; inappropriate background for face shot capture and non-resilience of data capturing machine.

 “All these have made industry experts to question the sanctity of the exercise with regards to the data collated.” The committee chairman added.

According to him, the Committee is perplexed to notice that the regime of poor quality of service still prevails in the industry.

He said: “Quality of service still remains frustrating. Service providers have become either helpless or careless in arresting the situation. The Commission needs to look further into this issue even if it requires imposing sanctions that include outright ban on further sales of SIM cards and stoppage of allocation of new number ranges to the operators until such affected operator is certified to have satisfied the regulator.”

Dr. Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman of the NCC, , said the information available to the Committee on the registration exercise was not “correct”.

He said the Commission has harmonised all its data with that of the service providers and that subscribers were being called upon by service providers to update their data at the instance of the Commission who had declared such entries invalid.

Juwah added that the registration is going on seamlessly and that it is coming o a point where subscribers who have not properly registered would be called upon to do so or risk deactivation.

The NCC boss observed that the NCC developed and made available the service providers the Quality of Service Regulation since 2012.