The Federal Government has said it is ready to enforce the implementation of its National Identification Number- Subscriber Identity Module policy as the deadline for the verification exercise ended on Thursday (Yesterday).

Howvwer, it has given telecommunication subscribers a couple of days to ensure that their SIMs are linked to their NINs.

Prior to this, the FG had extended the deadline for the SIM-NIN verification exercise from December 31, 2021 to March 31, 2022.

The Federal Government disclosed the latest development in a joint statement titled, ” Federal Government Urges Citizens to Link NIN to SIM Without Delay”.

The statement was signed by the Director, Public Affairs Nigerian Communications Commissions, National  Identity Management Commission, Mr. Kayode Adegoke.

When the SIM-NIN policy is implemented, SIMs that are not linked to their NINs will stop working. Commenting on this, The National Association of Subscribers, Adeolu Ogunbanjo, said the government cannot enforce the policy yet because of the various challenges limiting the SIM-NIN exercise.

He said, they cannot implement the policy because there are many situations why they cannot. A lot of SIM-NIN centres have capacity challenges. There are downtime challenges too and this has a lot of impact on the SIM-NIN registration process.

“I think what they are trying to say is that for now, there is no use extending the deadline for another three months since something else might cause another extension. What we want to hold on to is the indefinite suspension.

“A couple of days not have a timeline, if there is a date timeline, there might be an issue. But without a timeline, it is indefinite. we believe this is indefinite because there are so many network challenges that cannot be stopped”.

He added that if the issues surrounding the NIN-SIM exercise weren’t solved, the extension might take longer.