New Telegraph

Kidnapping: Evaluating NIN-SIM linkage effect

Amidst rising insecurity in the country, the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, last week, said the policy mandating linking of the National Identification Number (NIN) with SIM had ‘drastically’ reduced kidnapping. Many Nigerians have, however, disagreed with the minister as records point otherwise. SAMSON AKINTARO reports

The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami, last week, gave an account of his stewardship in the last two years. Pantami, who came on board on August 24, 2019, gave himself a thumb up for coming up with a policy that compels all Nigerians to link their National Identification Number (NIN) with their Subscriber Identity Module (SIM). He said that with the implementation of the policy, which kicked off last year, Nigeria had become safer as cases of kidnapping has been reduced ‘drastically.’ Industry stakeholders, as well as Nigerians, have, however, said that the minister’s claim is far from the reality. Indeed, several local and international reports about the security situation in Nigeria show rising cases of kidnapping and banditry across the country between last year and this year.

Pantami’s account

Speaking in Abuja at an event to give account of his stewardship since assuming office in 2019, Patami said his arrival in the ICT sector had brought a lot of changes in the last two years. He said: “When I was assigned to supervise the sector on August 24, 2019, unregistered and partially registered SIMs were being used to perpetrate crime in the country. Nobody knew the total number of unregistered SIMs. “Within less than 15 days in the office, we have engaged the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) as a regulator. We have directed them to carry out audit exercise to enable them come up with unregistered and partially registered SIMs. “They came with around 9.4 million, which is enough to populate another country. It was the first time we didn’t know the total of unregistered SIM in the country. “And we went further to direct NCC, to ensure that by September 25, 2019, that is only one month and a few days in office, I spent there to ensure that by end of September 2021, no SIM that is not registered would be on our network. NCC as a regulator implemented that effectively. “From the end of September 2019 to 2020, you will discover that even kidnapping and banditry reduced to the barest minimum. It was a time that hardly can you spend one month or more without hearing about kidnapping. “The more you come up with policies to make the system effective, the more criminals will come up with another strategy to compromise the policies.” He further explained that before the introduction of the policy, some unscrupulous Nigerians working in cahoots with a handful of agents of telecommunication officials engaged in illegally preregistering sim cards that were sold to criminal gangs to perpetrate crime.

Stakeholders react

While the minister had indeed come up with the NIN-SIM integration policy, stakeholders argued that the only impact of the exercise, of which the deadline has been shifted several times, is the shrinking of the telecommunications subscriptions and the reversal of broadband growth in the country. “Yes, we have seen impacts, but not in the area of national security as being claimed. We have seen operators losing over 15 million subscriptions in the space of three months, which has never happened before. “We have also seen broadband penetration declined from 45 per cent to 41 per cent. These are the results. It is an insult on Nigerians to claim that kidnapping and banditry have reduced because of the NIN-SIM linkage when even the blind can see how the cases of kidnappings have increased in recent time,” one of the key stakeholders in the ICT industry, who would not want to be named, said. For Mr. Adewale Adeoye, an IT expert, the minister should have mentioned his policies without necessarily painting a false image of positive impacts. “We all know the security situation in the country is getting worse, there is no need to create a false impression that the NIN-SIM exercise is working in this aspect. Can we address insecurity with technology? Yes. But we are not there yet,” he said.

The reality

Contrary to the minister’s claim, checks by this paper revealed a surge in cases of kidnapping in the last two years. There have been more reports of mass abductions in the last eight months. For instance, on December 11, 2020, 300 male students of Government Science Secondary School in Kankara in Katsina State were abducted. On February 26, 2021, 300 female students were also abducted from Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe, Zamfara State. Other cases include the March 12, 2021 abduction of 210 students and staff of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka and the April 20, 2021 killing of one and abduction of 22 staff and students of Greenfield University, Kasarami Village, Gwagwada, both in Kaduna State. There have also been reports of individual, collective and mass abduction carried out by bandits in the country, including the about 200 students of Salihu Tanko Islamiyya School in Rafi Local Government Area of Niger State on May 30, 2021 among several others.

Unpleasant reports

According to a 2021 report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a disaggregated data collection, analysis and crisis mapping project on political violence and protest around the world, abduction/ forced disappearance events in Nigeria increased “dramatically in 2020.” The report titled: “Mapping Nigeria’s Kidnapping Crisis: Players, Targets and Trends,” which covers January 1, 2018, to April 30, 2021, disclosed that the abductions/forced disappearance events in Nigeria were carried out by Fulani ethnic militia and/ or pastoralists, the Islamic State (West Africa) and/or Boko Haram, communal militia and unidentified armed group. ACLED data showed that a little less than 150 events of political abductions/ forced disappearances were in 2019, while over 350 events were recorded in 2020. Data also showed that about 150 events were recorded in just four months of 2021 – between January 1 and April 30. In another analysis, ACLEAD said smaller mass kidnappings now routinely occur in every corner of the country, noting that the estimated 1,100 total number of abducted persons in 2020 is more than double the amount kidnapped at Boko Haram’s height in 2014. The analysis further stated that “nearly as many people — 2,690 in 2020 — are now being killed in the north-west of the country, the heart of the bandit crisis, as in Boko Haram’s stronghold, Borno State, where 3,044 civilians were killed. The violence has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the north-west.” Amnesty International, in its December 2018 report titled Harvest of Death: Three Years of Bloody Clashes Between Farmers and Herders in Nigeria, said 2,802 were killed in 2018, about a year before the minister assumed office. In another report, the agency noted that at least 1,126 people were killed by bandits in Nigeria in the first half of 2020 alone after documenting an alarming escalation in attacks and abductions in several states in North-West and North-Central, adding that the worst affected are villages in the south of Kaduna State, where armed men killed at least 366 people in multiple attacks between January and July 2020. At the end of 2020, a total of 937 people were said to have been killed by bandits and 1,972 kidnapped within the period, according to the Kaduna State 2020 Annual Security Report made public by the state Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, in March 2021.

Leveraging technology for security

While the NIN-SIM integration has national security as its core objective, analysts said Nigeria may have to look beyond this policy to leverage every possible technological means to address its security challenge. According to industry experts, the fact that kidnappers and other criminal elements in the country are still using mobile devices to freely communicate with their victims’ family despite the mandatory NIN-SIM linkage is a pointer to the need for more serious strategies by the government. They pointed out that with the establishment of Emergency Communications Centres and the deployment of 112 National Emergency Number across the country by the NCC, what Nigeria needs to leverage this infrastructure is inter-agencies collaboration. This, they said, would ensure quick response of the various security agencies to emergency calls directed to the centres. At the unveiling of the emergency number and ECC for FCT, President Muhammadu Buhari had underscored the significance of the project, describing it as a project that would complement the Federal Government’s efforts at enhancing the security of lives and property in the country.

Last line

The security challenges confronting the country is, no doubt, enormous. A multi-pronged approach, with collaborations from all government agencies, is required to address the challenges.

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