Bosun Tijani
Despite years of SIM registration reforms and the mandatory NIN–SIM linkage policy, kidnappers and other criminal groups in Nigeria continue to make ransom calls—raising renewed questions about the effectiveness of the country’s telecom surveillance framework.
Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, acknowledged the challenge while speaking on Politics Today on Channels Television, admitting that criminal networks have evolved faster than existing monitoring systems.
While the Federal Government has repeatedly presented SIM registration as a major security breakthrough since its rollout in 2020, reports of kidnappers negotiating ransoms via mobile phones have persisted, fuelling public scepticism.
According to Tijani, telecommunications companies carried out extensive SIM “clean-up” exercises, but criminals simply adapted, deploying more sophisticated technologies that allow them to route calls through multiple telecom towers, obscuring their locations.
“They are not using the normal towers; they bounce calls off multiple towers,” the minister said, explaining why security agencies often struggle to pinpoint call origins.
However, security analysts say the admission exposes deeper structural weaknesses in Nigeria’s telecom-security integration. Critics argue that while millions of Nigerians were forced to link their SIMs to national identity numbers—sometimes at great economic and social cost—criminal networks appear to have found ways around the system with minimal disruption.
The minister pointed to unconnected and underserved rural areas as key enablers of criminal communication, noting that weak infrastructure creates blind spots exploited by kidnappers and illegal SIM operators. Yet observers question why such vulnerabilities persist more than four years after the NIN–SIM policy was introduced.
To close these gaps, the government is banking on a large-scale connectivity overhaul involving fibre-optic expansion, satellite upgrades and the deployment of 4,000 telecom towers in rural communities. The project, approved by the Federal Executive Council and to be executed in partnership with Huawei, is expected to begin next year.
Tijani also disclosed that Nigeria is the only West African country operating its own communications satellites—a strategic asset he said is now being upgraded to compensate for tower failures in hard-to-reach areas.
“This is why we are upgrading our two satellites, so that if our towers are not working, our satellites will work,” he said, though he admitted the satellite phase would take longer to complete.
Civil society groups, however, warn that infrastructure expansion alone may not solve the problem without stronger intelligence coordination, regulatory enforcement and transparency on how telecom data is shared with security agencies.
The minister’s remarks have also revived memories of past emergency measures, including the 2021 shutdown of telecom services in Zamfara State, which authorities said aided military operations but drew criticism over economic hardship and civil liberties.
While the government insists its current strategy seeks a balance between security and digital inclusion, analysts say the real test will be whether the new investments deliver measurable results—or merely shift the problem elsewhere.
For many Nigerians, the lingering question remains: if criminals can still exploit the system despite strict SIM controls, who truly bears the burden of the policy—and who is being held accountable for its shortcomings?