By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
A firebrand activist, Aisha Yesufu, may be disconnected from telephone and telecommunication services at the expiration of the June deadline for subscribers to integrate their SIM with NIN.
Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Isa Ali Pantami, had announced in December 2020 that subscribers of telecommunication services would be disconnected unless they integrate their NIN with SIM.
The NIN is the National Identity Number, a unique set of numbers that identify every citizen. It also serves as the password to unlock their personal information stored in the government database. The SIM is Subscriber Identification Module, the means by which a person accessed telecommunication services. Linking the two together would require the citizen to supply his NIN to the telecommunication company he uses.
For Aisha Yesufu, she would rather go without a phone than link her NIN with SIM, which she said would compromise her personal information to Isa Ali Pantami, the minister whose past comments revealed he has sympathy for terror groups like Al-Qaeda and Taliban.
Although he claims the comments were made during his formative years in Islamic Theology, TheNiche has published an exclusive interview with the father of a student, Sunday Achi, who was hacked to death in 2004 by Muslim students following the alleged incendiary preaching of the Chief Imam of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Mosque in Bauchi. That Chief Imam is now Nigeria’s Communication and Digital Economy Minister, Isa Ali Pantami.
Yesufu said: “Let me repeat categorically what I have said before. I WILL NOT BE LINKING MY NIN to my phone number! I will rather not have a phone line than willingly give my information and have it in the control of a terrorist sympathiser and his cohorts #PantamiMustGo.”