By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata<\/p>\n
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), says 59.7 million active phone lines were deactivated in 2024 due to strict enforcement of the NIN-SIM linkage policy.<\/p>\n
This pushed the nation\u2019s active subscriber base down from 224.7 million in 2023 to 164.9 million by December 2024, a 26.6% drop.<\/p>\n
The NCC attributed the sharp decline to the barring of SIMs not linked to verified NINs, as well as a correction of subscriber-count discrepancies by a major operator.<\/p>\n
From 15 September 2024, all unlinked SIMs were automatically barred following a final government deadline.<\/p>\n
The policy, jointly driven by the NCC and NIMC since 2020, aims to curb crimes enabled by anonymous SIMs, improve national security, and strengthen Nigeria\u2019s identity database.<\/p>\n
President Bola Tinubu later announced that over 126 million Nigerians had been enrolled in the National Identity Database after its capacity was expanded to 250 million records.<\/p>\n
The NCC report showed teledensity fell from 103.66% in 2023 to 76.08% in 2024, while internet subscriptions declined by 24.6 million to 139.3 million.<\/p>\n
Despite the losses, network coverage improved, with Nigeria attaining over 95% cellular coverage and broadband penetration rising slightly to 44.43%.<\/p>\n
Fresh NCC data show signs of recovery in 2025: active mobile subscriptions climbed to 173.54 million in September, up from 171.57 million in August, while internet subscriptions rose to 140.36 million.<\/p>\n
Teledensity also increased to 80.05%, indicating gradual industry rebound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), says 59.7 million active phone lines were deactivated in 2024 due to strict enforcement of the NIN-SIM linkage policy. This pushed the nation\u2019s active subscriber base down from 224.7 million in 2023 to 164.9 million by December 2024, a 26.6% drop. The NCC attributed the sharp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":78863,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78861"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78864,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78861\/revisions\/78864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}