SIM registration: No deadline extension, NCC tells subscribers

The Nigerian Communications Commission on Tuesday said the June 30 deadline for the Subscriber Identity Module card registration exercise would not be extended. The commission said there would be no excuse for anyone whose SIM card remained unregistered by that date as all unregistered SIMs would be disconnected. The Director, Public Affairs, NCC, Mr. Tony Ojobo, confirmed this to our correspondent in a telephone interview.

“There will be no extension for this. SIM registration has been on for two years now. Come June 30, all unregistered SIMs will be disconnected,” he said. Ojobo, however, advised subscribers to make efforts to know what their registration status was if they had any doubts. “Subscribers can send ‘REG’ to 746 to confirm if their SIMs have been registered or not,” he said.

According to him, telecoms operators are also making efforts to create the necessary awareness through the media, as none of them is prepared to lose any subscriber in the process. The NCC spokesperson, who lamented that some Nigerians had neglected the call for SIM registration, said, “Why will people wait up till now to register their SIMs? I don’t understand. This time, we are not going to entertain any excuses.”

But with just five days to the end of the exercise, some subscribers, who claimed to have registered their SIMs before now, said they were still getting messages from the operators urging them to go and register their SIMs or complete the registration process. Ojobo, however, said the telecoms companies could send such messages at random, but advised, “To be sure of their status, subscribers should send ‘REG’ to 746.

Another option available to subscribers, our correspondent learnt, was to dial *746#. The consumer complaints, which cut across the mobile operators, intensified after the industry regulator said last month that unregistered SIM cards would be cut off from the networks after June 30 this year.

Recent developments have shown that some subscribers, who registered their SIM cards many months ago, are also receiving text messages to do the exercise afresh.A subscriber, Mr. Ayobami Okubule, told our correspondent that his SIM had been registered twice since the process commenced. Okubule, who re-registered his SIM last Friday after he got a text message to register it, got another message from his operator on Tuesday (yesterday) that he still needed to register the SIM.

A top officer in one of the telecoms firms in the country told our correspondent in confidence that the anomalies being noticed in the process were due to human errors. He said in the course of synchronising data collected during the registration process, there could be some errors, adding, “We cannot have a perfect scenario.” According to him, the best way for a subscriber to know his/her status is to confirm from the operator by using the given codes.

The June 30 date, the NCC had explained, was arrived at a meeting between the regulatory agency and the telecoms operators. In a bid to lure subscribers to register their SIMs, the operators are currently running reward schemes for those that register for the first time.