Human Rights and Pro-democracy groups have asked the Federal Government of Nigeria to impose severe sanctions on the Global Mobile Service (GSM) providers in the country for flouting guide line and regulations guiding their operations.
The Human Rights, Liberty Access and Peace Defenders’Foundation (HURIDE), and Campaign for Democracy (CD) South East Zone in a joint statement issued in Enugu, the Enugu State capital after their end of the year meeting, accused the GSM providers of encourging crime and criminalities in the country through their cut- throat competition and unbridled quest for profit.
The groups in the statement Signed by Dede Uzor A Uzor, alleged that the service providers flouted Federal Government’s directive that no unregistered sim card number should be issued for public use.
Unfortunately, said the groups, these service providers observed in breach this particular directive aimed at checking crime in the country in breach.
Uzor noted; “Yes they are not observing the Federal Government directive on sim registration.
“They go ahead to sell and activate unregistered sim card numbers to people in a black markets, like Kano Market, Onitsha Emeka Offor Market, Aba Market, Alaba International, Kaduna in virtually in all the public markets in Nigeria, who use it for criminal activities including yahoo criminal activities.
“A network provider uses one registration particulars to register over one thousands (1000) of simcards just for financial gain.
“That is why it is always difficult to track these criminals because most of the simcards they use in their handsets were not registered or traceable to them and therefore they could not be track to any particular user”.
The rights bodies said most of the kidnappers in the country use unregistered sim cards, demanding for ramsom on the case of kidnapping and other high profile criminal activities and that is why tracing them is difficult if not impossible.
They only way out of this, they said, is for Federal Government to beam its searchlight on these four (4) major GSM service providers like Multi Transition Network (MTN), AIRTEL Network, GLO Network and 9 MOBILE Network and any of them found wanting should face the wrath of the law.
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