Registration of SIM cards risks alienating those at the bottom of the pyramid

In December 2020, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) instructed mobile network service providers to deactivate, within a two-week period, SIM cards that were not linked to National Identity Numbers (NIN), an announcement that was met with uproar from citizens.

The deadline has been shifted at least twice, and it is now set for 6 April 2021.

It took eight years to register about 42 million people on the NIN database. Nigeria has about 100 million mobile network subscribers, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) would need to register over 57 million subscribers within a four-month window to meet this target.

Granted that as many people have more than one SIM, the actual number of new registrations could be fewer. Nevertheless, many of the 57m unregistered active SIM card owners will be largely in underserved, rural and urban poor areas without the requisite access to the systems to enable registration.

These people are also the ones who will be most impacted negatively, by being disconnected from network services after the deadline set by NCC has lapsed.

NIMC says that they have instituted an online system that only allows pre-booked persons to attend their offices for registration on any particular day and they have encouraged pre-enrolment via their portal.

This move is definitely laudable; however, it does not take into consideration how many people have access to internet connectivity or internet-enabled devices.

This delivers an interesting Catch 22: the people who are able to take advantage of these online registration platforms are likely to be the people who are already registered or can be registered with ease and therefore do not need assistance or support in facilitating the process. If the costs and barriers associated with the identity registration process appear to outweigh the benefits of actually having a registered identity, how will success be achieved?

The Federal Government recently approved the extension of the tenure of NIN enrolment agent licenses for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) by five years; a good step that incentivises MNOs to apply their considerable infrastructure to remove some of the existing bottlenecks and achieve the scale required in what is a very intensive process.

Irrespective of this, meeting the 6 April deadline remains highly unlikely due to constraints in requisite infrastructure resources like manpower, stable electricity and internet connectivity as well as the technology that registration centres need to register those without a NIN.

In fact, it is these same challenges that motivated the request of almost half a billion dollars in loans from the World Bank to facilitate the increase of registration centres necessary for NIN registrations.

And yet, the deadline imposed by the government will have us believe that it is trying to encourage citizen compliance for a process with challenges that are more related to a fundamental lack of harmonisation, scale, capacity and infrastructure than they are to citizen compliance.

Threats of SIM disconnection instead of comprehensively addressing the infrastructural gap is likely to compromise public trust in the system and could lead to general apathy when the necessary infrastructure is eventually in place.