From the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC): “With the aim to curtail the counterfeit mobile phone market, discourage mobile phone theft, enhance National Security, protect consumer interest, increase revenue generation for the government, reduce the rate of kidnapping, mitigate the use of stolen phones for crime, and facilitate blocking or tracing of stolen mobile phones and other smart devices, one of the means to achieve this is through the deployment of Device Management System.”
Yes, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has instructed phone users to submit their International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) to the Commission within three months.
According to Bell, the “International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number is a unique identification or serial number that all mobile phones and smartphones have. It is normally 15 digits long. The IMEI number can be found on the silver sticker on the back of your phone, under the battery pack, or on the box your phone came in”.
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This is a very strange policy which mirrors when young people make mobile apps to find ambulances in cities with no ambulatory vehicles or those amazing apps which can help you find sources of water even though the app will not carry the water. I am not sure our challenge is not knowing where bad guys are, the issue remains capabilities.
So, if you have 200 million IMEI for phones and one is stolen, do we have the capacity to recover it? Like the Police rescue app, the root cause is not that the police does not know it needs to rescue, the challenge is that a policeman may be engaged by more than one citizen at a time. The app will not magically double that police officer. Possibly, the solution might have been hiring more police officers.
Have you registered your iPhone? It is the law and law breakers can have their phones “confiscated”, and auctioned! Running Nigeria is indeed tough – and experimentation continues.
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they are more interested in the fees people will pay for the registration. do you have the faintest idea how much they made for he “NIN and phone number” story. who did it help? what did it achieve? how much money was made? – this one is the interesting one for all the players.
Well, they came back later that day to say that the message was wrongly passed that they did not ask people to send in their IMEI. They said they have a system to collect that automatically without people submitting them. You can check that out too. [I saw this in the news by the way]