This was made known by the Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), Gbenga Adebayo, who spoke on behalf of the telecom firms.
According to Punch, the NIMC provided about 45 million NINs, as it registered about two million people in the last one month after the Federal Government ordered citizens to register their SIMs with valid NINs.
Adebayo said that the NINs have been sent to NIMC for verification in order to ensure that the numbers were harmonized with their respective SIMs.
“I don’t have the number of SIM cards that have been linked but at the last count, NIMC told us that they have about 43 million Nigerians who have NINs.
”So, we will be safe to assume that a large percentage of these citizens have delivered their NINs to the operators by way of dialling the USSD access code and/or visiting the operators’ websites and uploading their NINs on the websites.
“And by extension, I will be right to say that operators have delivered those NINs to NIMC. Now, the second part of it, which is not in our control, is how many of these numbers uploaded by the operators and forwarded to NIMC have been harmonised?
”How many of them have been verified? That is not in our control, but as an industry, the large numbers we received from subscribers have since been delivered to NIMC.”
Adebayo pointed out that the responsibility is now that of the commission to educate the public on the number of NINs that had been verified and cleared for harmonisation with SIMs.
On whether the government would block the SIMs of subscribers who don’t yet have their SIMs registered despite submitting their NINs to their service providers, the ALTON chairman said such SIMs would not be blocked.
It could be recalled that the Federal Government had on December 15, 2020, directed the telecom operators to block subscribers who had not registered their SIMs with valid NINs by December 30, 2020.
As a public outcry against the earlier announcement, the Federal Government extended the December 30, 2020 deadline to January 19, 2021, and also gave 6 weeks extension for subscribers without NIN from December 30, 2020 to February 9, 2021.
