The Federal Government has approved the activation of new SIM card registration with mandatory National Identity Number for individuals and corporate Organizations from Monday April 19, 2021.
This was disclosed in a statement signed on Thursday by the Technical Assistant (Information Technology) to the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Femi Adeluyi.
He stated that the key aspects of the draft policy were presented to the stakeholders at the 4th review meeting of the Ministerial Task Force on the NIN-SIM registration which held in February.
This is as the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Dr Isa Pantami also presented the revised policy to President Muhammadu Buhari, on March 26, and the final amendments were completed Wednesday with further improvements and endorsed by the President.
The policy includes guidelines on new SIM acquisition and activation, SIM replacement, New SIM activation for corporates and Internet-of-Things/Machine-to-Machine, amongst others.
It further states that individuals and corporates will present the national identity number (NIN) as a prerequisite for SIM registration and activation.
“Issuance of new SIMs and other suspended activities will resume on the same date (April 19th), as long as verification is done and the guidelines are fully adhered to. The minister has directed NCC and NIMC to ensure that the provisions of the Policy are strictly followed by all operators and subscribers”.
“For the Corporate registration, institutions will be required to appoint a Telecoms Master (at the minimum of an Executive Management level) to provide the operational Primary NIN representation. The Telecoms Master will also be responsible to ensuring that the users provide their NINs to serve as a Secondary NIN”.
“In the event that a data only service is particular to individual use (eg home car tracking, WiFi, MiFi services, etc), the standard NIN registration process will be followed. “A Telecoms Master will also be required for Corporates requiring IoT/M2M activations.
The full details of the requirements for each class of service will be made available in due course.
