Nigeria loses $200m to uncoordinated SIM registration –Report

Despite claims by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) that it achieved a seamless exercise in sim card registrations; this has been discovered not to be the case.

It has been discovered that more than 60 per cent of the registered cards are said to have unsubstantiated contact addresses, calling into question, the $200 million said to have been used for the exercise.

A survey by a non-governmental organization, Telecos Monitors, said the primary reason for embarking on the registration exercise in the first place was to eliminate organized crimes, including kidnapping, armed robbery and other crimes, but that it has not been achieved.

The group noted, that the NCC should take responsibility for the failure of the registration exercise, which cost the country more than $200 million to have a seamless system.

However, though the essence of having all sim cards in Nigeria registered is to enable security operatives trace contacts of all telephone subscribers, most of the addresses that phone users issued, especially those involved in crime, have no existing contacts.

According to Ms Bridget Chums, the coordinator of the NGO, more than 60 per cent of kidnap cases, recorded between 2012 and 2016, had contacted victims’ families with phone lines registered with phony addresses.

In its November 2016 report, Telecos Monitors stated that from a cross section of the 89 million telephone subscribers surveyed, only 10 million had genuine and traceable addresses of subscribers captured in the data banks of both NCC and the licensed GSM and land line operators.

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The report concluded: “The number of reported cases of kidnapping, which is supposed to be resolved by tracing addresses of perpetrators of the crime through their telephone links, has remained unattended to.

“In the past five years that such crimes like kidnapping, Boko Haram terrorism, Niger Delta militancy and other acts have assumed new dimensions, the expected gain of capturing names of phone subscribers involved, through the Sim registration contacts details has not helped in checking such crimes.”

But NCC officials say though the said report is yet to be fully analysed, the various states and their local councils in the country should rather be held responsible for any failure since they are yet to come up with reliable street naming codes.

He said the commission is yet to be officially informed of any default in use of sim registration to assist the security operatives to check any criminality.

 

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