Thousands of telecommunications subscribers around the country have been left stranded due to a technical fault in the National Identity Management Commission portal, which has rendered SIM-related services unavailable.
According to the Federal Government’s decision, the impacted NIMC portal allows telecom companies, the Nigerian Immigration Service, banks, and other organizations to authenticate their clients’ National Identity Numbers before providing service to them.
Following the directive by the Nigerian Communications Commission for the inclusion of NIN in the requirements for all new and existing SIM cards, telecom firms are required to synchronise their SIM registration portals with the NIMC portal in order to verify the details of their subscribers.
Downtime enters sixth day, MTN, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile suspend SIM replacement/acquisition
However, the downtime experienced over the past five days by the NIMC portal has made it almost impossible for telecom firms to sell new SIM cards or retrieve lost lines.
According to a source at MTN who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorised to speak on the matter, the downtime in the NIMC network which occurred late on Tuesday has brought SIM-related services to a halt.
The source said, “NIMC made it compulsory that before we can register a customer, we have to verify their NIN. The agency gave us a back route to its server.
We connect to the server to verify NIN. When we verify, it will bring the record of the customer (the information the customer gave to NIMC while registering for NIN). We have to confirm the information the customer gave NIMC against what we have.
There’s a way we connect to the NIMC server. It is that server that has been down since Wednesday.
“Before now, we didn’t need NIN to do this.
We just used the customer’s valid ID card and SIM pack. If the customer does not have that, a sworn affidavit is okay.
However, the introduction of NIN has changed that.”
Speaking on how the development might affect the company’s revenue, the official said, “We have registration stores (centres) that attend to hundreds of customers on a daily basis.
In my service centre, we attend to not less than 200 customers in a day.
We can’t really estimate the amount we are losing. Sometimes, after retrieving their lines, some customers can buy as much as N30,000 airtime.
Some can buy as much as N5,000 airtime. So, any day we don’t do business, one service centre can lose up to hundreds of thousands of naira.”
When our correspondents visited some service centres of the telcos, officials and customers narrated their ordeals.
When one of our correspondents paid a visit to a Glo retail outlet in Lagos, a myriad of frustrated subscribers could be seen inside and outside the premises of the service centre.
Some of the subscribers told our correspondent that they had visited the outlet for days on end but they were not attended to due to the NIMC portal glitch.
“Seriously I don’t understand, and I called them to ask if everything was okay before I came here.
I came the other day and they told me the same thing,” a disgruntled subscriber said after being told SIM-related services was yet to be restored due to the NIMC server glitch.