The Federal Government has once more extended the deadline for registration and linking of the National Identification Numbers (NINs) to SIM cards by one month to May 6th. The move by the Nigerian Federal Government for citizens to procure the NIN and link them with their SIM cards was first announced in mid-December 2020. A two-week period was prescribed for the exercise, but after it was clear that the time window was insufficient, the Federal Government extended it to February, and then further pushed it to April 6th.
The approval to extend the period of the NIN-SIM linkage was given at the meeting of the Ministerial Task Force on NIN-SIM data linkage held on Thursday in Abuja. The extension statement mentioned that over 51 million people now have their NINs with a significant increase in the monthly enrolments.
“Based on the updates of the NIN-registration process, over 51 million people have been assigned NINs. There are many people who have enrolled and are in the process of being assigned NINs. With each individual having an average of three to four SIMs, the total number of SIMs tied to NINs would be close to the total number of registered SIMs in the country. The current number of monthly enrollments has increased significantly to about 2.6 million registrations.
There has also been a remarkable increase in the number of enrolment centres across the country with about 3,800 centres available for enrollments. There are also many more new centres in the pipeline,” the statement said.
With this extension, it is expected that more citizens would be able to perform this exercise, but it also implies that thousands of Nigerians whose source of living depends on SIM registration would have to wait a little longer for business to resume as normal.
In the past, there have been calls and even lawsuits against the Nigerian government to either rethink how it is going about the NIN procurement process or suspend the exercise entirely. As at January, there were 47.8 million new subscribers with NINs, while 21 million subscribers were yet to obtain their NIN.
While about 51 million subscribers have their NINs linked to their SIM cards, critics say that the remaining 17 million subscribers may still not be able to get theirs linked within the next one month.