The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) insists that Kenyans must register their SIM cards before the April 15th deadline.
CA director-general Ezra Chiloba on Friday warned that the deadline for the exercise will not be extended and urged those who are yet to duly register their SIM cards with their respective telecommunication providers to do so before next Friday or face disconnection.
He argued that the registration exercise has been ongoing since January and Kenyans have been given enough time to comply with the requirement.
“For the last two years, we have been working with operators by largely issuing directives to ensure that subscribers are properly registered for them to be able to access communication services for the greater good of our society. So early this year we followed up on the matter with the telcos and we gave them a deadline of ensuring that by April 15th their respective databases on subscribers were up to date,” said Chiloba.
“As usual what happens in this country is that people are very active towards the deadline but the campaigns for registration started in January and they were being led by the telcos themselves.”
While decrying the low rate of compliance, the official maintained that anyone who fails to comply by April 15th will have their SIM card switched off.
“If you don’t do that (register) the telcos are going to switch you off. Looking at the situation across the country, the compliance rate is not good at all which means the risks are even much higher,” Chiloba added.
He noted that each of the more than 65 million SIM cards in operation in the country must be registered.
“We must ensure that each and every subscriber is registered. We got about 65 million SIM cards out there in operation yet the population of Kenya is not 50 million. This means each and every person in this country including the newborn has a number attached to them. But we know some of us have more than one SIM card. Some registered and others not,” he said.
He also defended the capturing of photos during SIM card registration, wondering why some people are skeptical about it yet they are comfortable sharing their images on social media.
“Each and every day people are sharing photos on social media and social media companies are able to put that data together and they are able to know us very well…. but when it comes to SIM card registration, assuming that the picture is required, we say ‘no’ but on a daily basis we live our lives on social media, sometimes carelessly,” he said.
Long queues have been witnessed at mobile service provider outlets across the country as Kenyans rush to beat the April 15th deadline.
