The Federal Government has again extended the NIN-SIM enrolment exercise till the end of the year.
The deadline was shifted from the previous date of October 31.
Minister of communications and digital economy, Isa Pantami, conveyed the approval of the federal government to extend the deadline in a statement issued and jointly signed by Ikechukwu Adinde, director of public affairs at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), and Kayode Adegoke, head of corporate communications at the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).
The statement reads: “The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami) has conveyed the approval of the Federal Government to extend the deadline for the National Identity Number (NIN)-Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) data verification. Citizens and legal residents are urged to complete the process before the end of the year 2021.
“The decision to extend the deadline was made further to appeals by the Mobile Network Operators and other industry stakeholders, soliciting for a further extension to ensure better compliance with government’s directive and to avoid widening the digital divide.
“The extension would also provide the enabling environment for the registration of Nigerians in remote areas, diaspora, schools, hospitals, worship centres, as well as foreigners, diplomatic missions, those in other areas that were hitherto unreachable, and increase enrolments in countries with a significant number of Nigerians.”
Further, the statement revealed that the review of the progress of the exercise indicated that over 66 million unique NIN have been issued- an indication of progress achieved in the ongoing NIN-SIM linkage.
“However, a significant part of the populace is yet to be registered into the National Identity Database (NIDB), which may be due to some challenges which the Federal Government has looked into and has made efforts to alleviate, hence the need to extend the deadline,” NIMC stated.