Nigeria Content Online

It will soon become legal for
mobile telephone service providers in Nigeria to record and keep calls
or messages sent over their network, if deliberations at the Senate are
anything to go by.

Recording customers’ call will
follow after the passage of a law, currently before the National
Assembly, to compulsorily register all mobile phone users in Nigeria.
The bill seeking to enact the law has progressed in the Senate, and it
is sponsored by George Thompson Sekibo (PDP Rivers State).

The bill, which passed second
reading last week, demands that service providers acquire and maintain
technologies that will enable them record, store and retrieve
transactions done over their network.

“Any recording of mobile phone
service carried on by a service provider …shall be stored by the
service provider for a period not less than 90 days,” the bill read.

Although it is envisaged that the
recorded calls and transactions will be used for national security, the
bill, however, did not state how the records will be accessed and who
is empowered to access them.

Beyond call recording, the bill,
when passed, will require the service providers to also acquire
technologies that will enable them inform their customers where a call
or text message originated from, on their mobile phone’s screen, as
they receive the call or message.

“It shall be the responsibility
and duty of every mobile phone service provider in the federation to
procure, maintain, and operate such devices, equipment, technology and
processes that shall ensure the appropriate location of the sources of
every voice call, text message, voice mail, etc, coming into or from
its network is displayable on the screen of the mobile phone appliances
of the subscribers, automatically,” the bill adds.

The main aim of the bill is to
curb the growing usage of mobile phones for scams and crime, by
registering all subscribers to mobile telephone services, both new and
existing.

Registration of customers

The cost of registering the
subscribers and acquiring the recommended technologies should,
according to the proposed law, borne by the service providers.

It “seeks to provide for the
formal registration of mobile phone subscribers by their service
providers for the purpose of ensuring responsible use of mobile phone
numbers by their respective owners and to prevent the increasing
incidences of abuse by some subscribers,” Mr Sekibo, the promoter of
the bill, said.

“Such abuses that are now
prevalent in every part of this country have caused and are still
causing a great deal of apprehension to several users of the mobile
phones, as indicated by the numerous nasty experiences revealed by
traumatised subscribers daily.” Although the bill is yet to become a
binding law, the mobile phones service providers have commenced the
registration of their subscribers. All the network service providers
operational in Nigeria have set up units in designated centres to
collect biometric data from their subscribers.

Ruben Mouka, the spokesperson of
the National Communication Commission (NCC), the body that regulates
the mobile phone service providers, said the companies embarked on the
registration following a “quasi-law” the commission issued them.

Although the proposed bill places
the cost of the process on the service providers while the NCC
supervises, Mr Mouka added that the commission will soon begin their
own comprehensive registration of mobile phone users in Nigeria at the
expense of the commission.

“The commission will do that
through consultants that will reach everybody in Nigeria, whether in
the hinterland or in the cities, something like the national identity
card registrations,” Mr Mouka told NEXT.