The House
of Representatives has ordered an investigation into the registration of
mobile telephone Subscriber Identification Module cards by the Nigerian
Communications Commission.
The House
said on Thursday that the project, which gulped over N6.1bn in 2011,
appeared not to have achieved the aim of identifying Global System for
Mobile communications users in the country.
In a
motion by Mr. Abdulrahman Terab, the House was informed that registered
SIM cards were “freely being sold on the streets of Abuja and other
parts of Nigeria.”
Terab said
the development had defeated the aim of providing a database for GSM
users and to track abuses with the information given during the
registration exercise.
The motion
read in part, “The House notes that SIM cards registered in other
people’s names are freely sold in Abuja and in some other parts of
Nigeria. It further notes that the essence of registration of SIM cards
is for control purposes across the country.
“The House
is concerned that if this act continues, it will negate the current
effort to get the true identity of mobile phone users in Nigeria. The
House is worried that criminals can take advantage of using registered
SIM cards to commit crime that can lead to wrongful arrest of innocent
citizens by security agents.”
The House
thereafter passed a resolution setting up an ad-hoc committee to
investigate the registration exercise and how the NCC spent the N6.1bn
approved for the project by the National Assembly in 2011.
Contributing
to the debate, the Chairman, House Committee on Diaspora, Mrs. Abike
Dabiri-Erewa, said accounting for the N6.1bn should be the condition for
the passage of the commission’s budget for 2012.
Incidentally,
the motion came to the floor on the same day that President Goodluck
Jonathan wrote the House, urging the lawmakers to consider NCC’s budget
this year.
“This
House in 2011 approved N6.1bn for the NCC to carry out SIM registration.
The commission must explain to Nigerians how that money was spent,
because as it is, we don’t seem to be getting the desired results”,
Dabiri-Erewa stated.
Terab had
earlier told the House that there appeared to be a cartel, which had
taken over the SIM registration exercise to ensure that it did not
succeed.
