Prof. Adeolu Akande, yesterday, said that wrong registration of SIM cards by Telecoms operators was responsible for the rising trend of kidnapping, banditry and armed robbery in the country.
Akande, who is President Muhammadu Buhari’s nominee for the post of Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), stated this while being screened by Senator Oluremi Tinubu-led Committee on Communications.
He insisted that the inability of GSM service providers to capture the true identity of their clients while registering their SIM cards had further heightened the level of criminality in the country.
He said: “There is no doubt that the use of communication as a tool for criminality has been on the rise. All over the world, emphasis are being placed on the use of telecommunication as a tool of curbing crime but unfortunately in Nigeria, we are seeing the opposite where communication has become the major tool of criminality.
“The major problem is that why kidnappers, armed robbers and bandits use communication facility is that we have problem with using communication to track the identity of Nigerians who are residents of Nigeria.
“The key problem is the management of the subscriber identity module known as SIM card. We found out that there is wrong phone registration of subscribers. People register SIM cards not with their true identity and when such SIM cards are used for criminality and they are tracked, it leads to wrong people rather than the authentic perpetrators of crimes.”
Speaking further, the nominee said: “So, we have issues with management of SIM cards by the operators. Of late, the NCC and the Ministry of Communications have tried to ratify this because I recall that in the last few months under the structure of the ministry, about 2million lines have been ratified.
“There appears to be a law after that effort when in the recent weeks we have also found out that the use of telephone or mobile phones for criminality have been on the rise. What this simply means is that telecoms are not doing what they are supposed to do.
“We have a regulation but what that says is that NCC has a lot to do with regulation and enforcement. NCC could be doing but the truth of the matter is that NCC has to do more because NCC occupies a very key position in the enforcement of security in the country.
“So NCC has to up its game to ensure that the telecoms operators register authentic people with the SIM cards, so that if anybody perpetrates any criminality using the SIM card, that person could be arrested and charged by the security agencies.”
The nominee stressed the need for close synergy between NCC and security agencies to end the increasing wave of insecurity in the country.
