The National Identification Number-Subscriber Identity Module (NIN-SIM) exercise has formally put the official telephone lines in Nigeria at 153.3 million, which is about a 30 per cent drop.
Findings showed that by the completion of the exercise in September, subscriber numbers dropped from 219,304,281 in March 2024 to 153,323,316 six months later.
The implication of this is that no SIM card in Nigeria operates without a verified NIN.
The SIM-NIN linkage initiative began in 2020, and by April 2022, 125 million lines had been linked. The NCC has set multiple deadlines since then, with the most recent series of final deadlines announced in December 2023.
Further checks and cleaning done by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in collaboration with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) also revealed that a particular mobile network operator incorrectly reported as many as 40 million active subscribers on its network, a development that negates and violates the NCC’s guidelines for determining active telecom subscribers.
It was gathered that after the cleaning of the NIN-SIM data, the particular network had its subscriber base dropped by half, which happened to be the corrected figure currently. NCC is expected to release the current official subscriber base in the coming week.
As stated before now, NCC has advised subscribers whose lines were barred to visit their network providers to link their SIM cards to their NIN for reactivation of their barred lines.
The Guardian gathered that some subscribers’ SIM cards have been reactivated after they visited their service providers to properly link their SIMs to their NIN and that the number of barred SIMs has dropped from 40 million to 24.8 million as of October 2024.
Meanwhile, to ensure the effectiveness of the NIN-SIM exercise, especially with the rising insecurity in the country, no one under 18 can register a SIM again because it is a legal contract between a mobile network operator and a user.
