MTN Nigeria has announced the closure of all its offices nationwide from July 30. A telecommunication company confirmed this to Journalists on Tuesday.
The official decision was due to vandalism of the company’s offices by aggrieved customers who had been cut off from connections in line with the government’s NIN-SIM linking policy.
On July 27, it was reported that phone lines had been blocked, preventing Nigerians across the country from making or receiving calls because their National Identification Numbers (NINs) were not linked to their
SIM cards.
On Monday, a group of angry customers vandalised a fence outside the MTN Nigeria office in Festac Town, Lagos. The incident occurred after subscribers besieged MTN offices complaining about the disconnection of their phone lines by the telecommunication company.
Offices of the telecommunication firm (MTN) in some parts of the country (Oyo, FCT, Kano) were also besieged by subscribers over the development.
Amid the intensifying unrest, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) ordered telecommunications operators to temporarily reconnect all phone lines that were blocked as part of the NIN-SIM validation process.
The NIN-SIM linking policy began in December 2020 when the Federal Government directed telecommunications companies to block unregistered SIM cards and SIMs not linked to NIN.
Since December 2023, the NCC has reviewed the deadline several times and set 15 April 2024 as the deadline for completely blocking the network of subscribers with four or fewer SIMs whose NIN details have not been verified.
However, the deadline was later extended to 31 July 2024 “to give consumers more time to ensure their submitted NIN details are properly verified”.
