Damilola Adeleye with agenc y report s 
To avoid the bitter experience of paying heavy fines to the Federal Government of Nigeria over non-registration of SIM cards, MTN’s Ghana operation may have to deactivate about a quarter of SIM cards on its network to comply with a directive from that country’s regulators on biometric registration.
Ghana’s National Communications Authority had advised that operators such as MTN would have to deactivate those SIM cards that have completed the first stage of a registration process, which ties these to a national identification card. The offending SIMs have not completed the second phase of this process that concerns biometric capture.
MTN has in recent years been making an effort to comply with regulations in its various operating countries to avoid skirmishes and possible fines that it and pay-TV operator MultiChoice had to deal with in places such as Nigeria. The group infamously faced a $5 billion fine in Nigeria over SIM registrations in 2015.
In Ghana, MTN has about 22.1-million subscribers that have completed the first stage registration, with 16.4-million having completed the biometric capture. That leaves 5.7-million customers at risk of deactivation on December 1 as part of the directive. MTN said it is committed to the registration exercise to help minimise fraud and to build an accurate customer database. The prospect of the cutting off of customers in Nigeria caused a sell-off in MTN shares earlier in the year.
The Nigeria Communications Commission said that all operators are required to restrict outgoing calls of subscribers whose SIMs are not yet linked with its national identity number, which is similar to SA’s ID system. The 2015 incident also hammered MTN’s share price.
The market appeared unfazed by the Ghana news, with the share price marginally positive at R135.95. MTN Ghana is also further facing regulatory pressure after the government instructed it to implement a 1.5% levy on mobile money transfers from May 1. As mobile money has grown, regulators have started devising ways to control or tax transactions on these platforms.
Rival Vodacom is feeling the effects of such moves in Tanzania, while MTN highlighted in May that it is dealing with new mobile-money taxes being implemented in Benin and Cameroon. Recall that MTN Nigeria Communications Plc (MTN), had paid a total of negotiated N330 billion to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) as fine over non-registration of SIM cards used by some of its subscribers.
The successful resolution of the fine was the outcome of active collaboration between the NCC and MTN. A spokesperson for the group had said: “We are very pleased to have completed the payment of the N330 billion negotiated settlement with the NCC.
“We are particularly gratified to be in a position to have fully met the terms of the settlement within the agreed timeframes. “I would like to thank the NCC for their constructive and collaborative approach to this issue, and believe that we emerge from it with a stronger relationship, focused on ensuring maximum value is delivered to our people, from a strong and growing telecoms sector.”
In October 2015, the regulator slammed MTN a fine of N1.04 trillion following failure to cut off five million unregistered subscribers after a deadline set by NCC, in agreement with major telcos in the country. The fine was eventually reduced to N330 billion with a condition that MTN will list on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) — a condition that has now been met by the telco.
