In this investigative report, Odimegwu Onwumere, a reporter based in Rivers State, takes a superficial glance at how Nigerians look at the Federal Government of Nigeria and the telecommunications regulator on the exercise of the SIM card registration that lasted for a period of 16 months. The exercise was introduced due to the growing flourish of crimes in the country where persons hide under anonymity of mobile phones and carry out nefarious crimes such as kidnapping and threat to life.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) had made this decision irrevocable. 6Billion Naira was given to the agency by the Federal Government of Nigeria in making sure that the exercise was not a futility. It was a mandate. Every Nigerian was expected to register his/her Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) card from May 2010, elapsing in six months time. When Nigerian subscribers could not register their SIMs within this period, another deadline of September 28 2011 was given, making the deadline twice.

Few people were out to register their SIM Cards at the beginning. Others were of the opinion that the idea would not work in Nigeria because of the way some projects before it were shabbily executed. But SIM Card registration in Nigeria later turned out to be a very big exercise, a festival of sort. Many of the authorised firms assigned to carry out the registration by the NCC, did not find it easy, as crowd of people trooped out en masse to register. Many Nigerians registered more than one, two and three SIM Cards. This was against what was experienced at the beginning the firms started to carry out a direct exercise, in what was termed “registering a few people to test run its efficiency.”

Just few weeks into the exercise, the SIM Card registration was attended with criticism. One was that NCC had no right to register individuals since the telephony companies were registered. Others however were of the opinion that SIM Card registration, though strange to Nigerians, was not strange to majority countries in the world. Experts told dissident that such countries as South Africa, Kenya and Botswana were among the legion of other countries that had initiated the exercise.