MTN Nigeria announced that it has cut off 4.2 million lines from its network as the deadline for linking National Identification Numbers (NIN) with mobile SIMs expired on February 28.
The company said the lines that were cut off belonged to subscribers who did not provide their NIN. MTN revealed this in its audited financial results published on Friday.
The company said that since December 2023, when NCC issued a directive for all subscriber lines without NIN to be fully barred, it had verified a total of 19 million lines.
Of these, it said 4.3 million have been confirmed and 4.2 million disconnected as of February 28, 2024.
The company, however, noted that the revenue impact of the disconnected lines was minimal as the users were of low value.
“Many of these lines were low-value customers, reducing the revenue effect. We are actively working with the authorities to speed up the NIN verification process.
“We have also enhanced our communication with the affected customers, offering various options for verification to avoid service interruption,” MTN stated.
Over 4 million subscribers added in 2023
Speaking on the company’s performance in 2023, MTN Nigeria’s CEO, Karl Toriola, said the company sustained strong commercial growth in its connectivity business and platforms, backed by the increase in the user base.
“We gained over 4 million subscribers in 2023, bringing our total base to 79.7 million. We also boosted our data subscribers by over 5 million to 44.6 million, which contributed to the total data traffic growth of 44.9%.
“This reflected the continuous growth in demand for data, supported by our attractive offers to customers and the steady investment in the quality and coverage of our network.
“The additional 2600MHz spectrum we acquired in September 2023 also helped us to add more capacity to our network more effectively,” Toriola said.
According to a directive issued by the NCC in December last year, all telecommunications operators in Nigeria, including MTN, Airtel, and Globacom, among others are to implement full network barring on all phone lines for which the subscribers have not submitted their national identification numbers (NINs) by February 28, 2024.
In addition, those who had submitted their NINs but have not been verified are also to be fully barred.
On NINs that have been submitted but not verified, such lines are to be barred on or before March 29, 2024, where five or more lines are linked to an unverified NIN.
Similarly, where less than five lines are linked to an unverified NIN, such lines are to be barred on or before April 15, 2024.
According to the directive, all affected subscribers must be verified (biometrics and biodata) before their lines are unbarred.
