After Honourable Oluwole Oke moved a
motion, under a matter of urgent public
importance, during Wednesday’s plenary, the
House unanimously passed the motion and
mandated its Committee on
Telecommunications to investigate alleged
non-compliance to the directive to deactivate
unregistered SIM cards on their networks.
The committee is also to check the role of
the regulator, the Nigerian Communications
Commission (NCC), in allowing the network
providers get away with the directive.
The committee is expected to report back to
the House in three weeks.
On August 5, the NCC issued a seven-day
ultimatum to telecommunication operators to
deactivate all improper and pre-registered
SIM cards or face sanctions.
Before the ultimatum was issued, the NCC
said more than 120 million SIM cards had
been registered and transmitted to the
central database by the operators.
The regulatory agency said validation exercise
revealed multitude of unreliable data in terms
of incomplete, inaccurate demographic and
biometric data.
Pre-registered SIM cards include those that
did not capture facial pictures or fingerprints.
