A very unfortunate way the government want to handle the issue of SIM card registration. We need not have a government full of people who cannot face the real problems and solve them. First the government allowed porting of numbers. When few dominant operators sabotaged the whole exercise, Ministry of Information and Communication PS Bitange Ndemo was on the side of the saboteurs issuing threats to the operators which were complying with the regulations.
Then the digital migration exercise where all media players were expected to move their broadcast to the digital regime. The mainstream media sabotaged the whole exercise even paying some fool called Stephen Mutoro who owns a briefcase NGO called Consumers Kenya to stop the migration and demand that the government give the broadcasters more time. This time, Bitange did nothing and went on some hypocritical rant on social media until the good Judge Lenaola warned him that he risked being committed to jail for contempt of court.
The government recently put December 2012 as the deadline for the registration of SIM cards in Kenya. The exercise was initially postponed for almost 3 times before the December 31 2012 date. The mobile phone operators have failed to switch off the unregistered SIM cards and now PS Bitange Ndemo has gone mad make all manner of FAKE declarations and issuing warnings to everyone but the operators.
Mobile Operators Are Not Ready To Switch-Off Fake Phones
PS Bitange Ndemo has warned subscribers who have not registered their SIM cards that they risk 3 years in jail or Ksh 300,000. The PS say that he has submitted the regulations with the AG and they will be gazetted on Friday. It is not clear who arre these people who have not registered their SIM cards. They might be dead or alive but they surely cannot be blamed.
CCK Chicken Out Of Switching Off Fake Handsets Again
First, Bitange Ndemo or the government has no powers to take anyone to court for not registering his/her SIM card. The government cannot jail 6 million Kenyans. Let no fool cheat you that it is possible. The smartest thing to do in the registration of SIM cards is that the operators switch-off the unregistered SIM cards. South Africa did it and Kenya can do it. Uganda has promised to do it by July 2013.
Uganda To Switch Off Fake Phones By July 2013
We just don’t have leaders willing to do it. Ndemo is the wrong person to implement this because he is in the pocket of most operators, especially the big ones
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I believe selling of sim cards should have the option of having the lines registered upon purchase like it used to happen back in 2001. Now the providers are just trying to raise their subscribers numbers yet they do not know who owns what. Funny bit is that most of these providers have databases of every phone imei used i mean the folks on river road can be stopped if they checked how long an IMEI has gone inactive in the system. Maybe I’m wrong but really Tunaenda mbele kweli…
I believe selling of sim cards should have the option of having the lines registered upon purchase like it used to happen back in 2001. Now the providers are just trying to raise their subscribers numbers yet they do not know who owns what. Funny bit is that most of these providers have databases of every phone imei used i mean the folks on river road can be stopped if they checked how long an IMEI has gone inactive in the system. Maybe I’m wrong but really Tunaenda mbele kweli…