The Subscriber Identity Modue (SIM) card registration exercise embarked upon by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), in conjunction with all the service providers in Nigeria will soon come to an end, as the NCC has announced June 30th as the deadline for the exercise.
Calling on all subscribers, who are yet to register their SIMs to do so before the said date, the Commission said it will go ahead to bar all nregistered SIM cards from the telecoms service.
The Director of Public Affairs, NCC, Mr. Tony Ojobo, who tweeted the breaking news on his twitter handle friday, said the decision to end the registration exercise was taken after a meeting between the Commission and the service providers.
According to him, the SIM card registration exercise, which began since March 28, 2011 would come to an end on the 30th June, 2013, and all SIM cards that were not registered will be barred.
“There’s now a window opportunity for those who have not registered their SIM cards to do so, otherwise from the 30th June, they will be barred and can’t use the number anymore to make calls,” he said.
Ojobo further said that the total number of registered SIMs will be made known after the June 30th cut-off date.
Often I don’t bother replying to a blog article or making any comments, but in this instance I feel the need to say ‘good job’!
It is shocking that NCC has completely derailed and has become something else. Instead of focusing on its primary role as a regulator of the telecommunication industry, it has become more of a busy body with more movement but no motion.
The telecom operators are ripping Nigerians off on a per second basis and all the heavily-compromised NCC can do is to apply a wrist slap and laughable penalties which a manager in the telecom company can pay in cash.
We have telecom masts littering the whole environment with its attendant adverse impacts on humans and the regulator is keeping mute on what potentially can give all of us nightmares in the future, medically-wise. NCC cannot deny that it is not aware of the dangers of having cell towers indiscriminately located and the effects of radiofrequency radiation (also known as electromagnetic radiation) in close proximity to residential houses yet, nothing is done to check the installation of telecom masts all over the place. There is a Guideline published by NCC in 2009 detailing the installation of telecom masts but can NCC tell Nigerians that it enforces the provisions contained in the Guideline? Very soon, we’ll start to read of epidemic outbreak of cancer and we’ll be wondering where it is coming from when we all have telecom masts hanging above our heads at every intersection and on our streets and right across our verandah while NCC continues to lambast (all it does these days) those who have refused to register their sim cards.