By Angeline Mgbele, Senior Correspondent, Abuja
Telecommunications regulatory authority, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has struck an agreement with the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) to address some of the criminal activities challenging the telecom industry, such as telecom equipment vandalism and fraudulent registration of Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards among others.
This is contained in a statement signed by the Director of Public Affairs(DPA) at NCC, Reuben Muoka.
The Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer(EVC/CEO) of NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, who addressed a gathering of senior management staff of NSCDC in the South West Zone, at an exclusive workshop organised by the Commission, hailed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) sealed between the agency and the Commission, to explore how the Corps would deploy enabling laws, subsidiary legislations, and extant guidelines to arrest any form of criminality in the sector.
Prof. Danbatta, who was represented at the workshop by the Director, Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement at the Commission, Ephraim Nwokonneya, said, over the years, the NCC had been working with relevant law enforcement agencies, and in particular the NSCDC, towards protecting telecom sector from all kinds of criminal behaviour.
“Through despicable activities that are criminal and totally at variance with national security concerns of government, the deviant elements in our midst have been acting to undermine efforts put in place to consolidate the gains of the sector,” Danbatta said.
The NCC boss declared that “These criminal activities include theft and vandalism of telecommunications infrastructure, the illegal use of fraudulently-registered Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards, operating without license, illegal call masking, and so on.”
He said while the NSCDC officers had been of tremendous assistance, the objective of the workshop was to constantly engage and update them on new trends and existing regulations, requiring concerted efforts for their implementation towards enhancing sanity in the telecom sector.
Danbatta said the NSCDC and other agencies havd done very well with the assistance of their personnel in carrying out raid exercises and mopping up fraudulently-registered SIM cards found in circulation, as well as in raising the banner of awareness on the need to protect critical national telecom infrastructure.
Some of the topical issues discussed at the workshop covered the activities of the Commission as presented by the relevant departments in the context of laws and other regulations, and in relation to the roles of NSCDC, as depicted in the presentation made by the NCC’s Head of Enforcement, Salisu Abdu, during the workshop.
