The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has revealed that Nigeria’s inactive mobile lines have risen to 96.7 million.
According to the latest subscriber data released by the NCC, inactive lines on the four network operators in Nigeria stood at N323.56 million connected lines as of February this year, while noting that active lines across the networks stood at 226.8 million at the end of the month.
This is coming after the NCC in 2022 revealed that the number of unused or abandoned mobile lines across all the networks declined by 13 percent, which showed that more Nigerians used their lines last year. As of December 2022, inactive lines on mobile networks stood at 94.4 million, which was down from the 109 million recorded at the end of 2021.
The recent rise in the number of inactive lines is attributed to the government’s policy that mandated network subscribers to link their lines to their National Identification Number (NIN), or risk being barred. While President Muhammadu Buhari gave the directive for the implementation and commencement of the exercise in December 2020, as part of the administration’s security and social policies, the deadline for the NIN-SIM linkage was extended on multiple occasions to allow Nigerians to freely comply with the Policy.
However, a lot of Nigerians still failed to comply with the directive and were barred from making calls which spurred them to register new lines. Many Nigerians had to abandon their mobile lines that year because of the government’s policy.
Investors King understands that a telephone line becomes inactive if it is not used by the subscriber to make or receive calls for at least 90 days. Conditions such as Slow economic conditions, continuous poor service, or the death of a subscriber could force their lines to become inactive.
Apart from the NIN-linkage issue, industry analysts also attributed the increasing number of inactive lines to the fact that SIM cards are now easy to acquire and dump.
According to them, the mobile network operators were also contributing to the increase through their aggressive marketing strategy of offering SIMs to customers cheap or free in some instances.
Analysts predict that the increase in inactive lines may further impact the first quarter (Q1) revenue of network operators who had already projected to miss their revenue target as a result of the recent naira shortage in the country.
