Around 20 per cent of Ugandan mobile users have yet to register their SIM cards two days before the end of the registration process and face having their lines disconnected.
Uganda’s SIM registration process has been taking place for the last three months and is set to finish on May 31.
The UCC had granted service providers a 180 day extension to the earlier deadline so operators could have 90 days for registration and 90 days for verification of the captured data before it started switching off all unregistered SIM Cards.
New Vision reports Fred Otunnu, communications manager for the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), said telecom operators will conduct a verification process on the subscribed data for a period of three months.
“After that we switch off, this will take place after three months but during this time it will be validation, it is more less a cleanup process,” said Otunnu.
MTN Uganda said it had registered 85 per cent of active subscribers, over 6.7 million, by end of April.
“The grace period enabled us to reach our customers particularly those in the rural areas and other hard to reach areas. We still have close to 15 per cent of our customers yet to register,” said Mazen Mroue, MTN Uganda’s chief executive officer (CEO).
Mazen said unexpected setbacks in the registration exercise included a lack of information about the process.
“Most subscribers do not have proper identification documents that meet the legal standards prescribed and as a result a large number of them cannot be registered,” he said.
SIM card registration has been a fraught process across East Africa. HumanIPO reported in January the more than 2.4 million unregistered SIM cards have been deactivated by Kenya’s four mobile service providers.
The Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) said earlier this month it was confident all mobile users will have registered their SIM cards before the July deadline, despite around 40 per cent having yet to have done so.
