President Magufuli extends Sim card registration deadline

Dar es Salaam . President John Magufuli has today,  Friday December 27, announced the extension of the deadline of biometric registration of Sim cards by 20 days with the original deadline set to end on December 31.

The President was speaking immediately after he had registered his Sim card saying he had granted more days to allow those who were not able due to circumstances to do so.

He, however, cautioned that after 20^th January there will be no further extension calling on Tanzania Communication regulatory authority to lock out all who will have not adhered to call to register.

“This kind of registration is important for national security and will help to address fraud incidents involving mobile phones,” he said in a statement.

“Those who did not make it until now should use this window to secure their IDs or numbers and register their Sim cards as required,” added the President.

Queues of Tanzanians were witnessed in the National Identification Authority (Nida) offices seeking either their IDs or respective numbers as the deadline for registration draws near.

According to the June, 2019 Communication Statistics Report by TCRA the country has a total of 43.75 million sim card owners.
In May this year the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) directed all Subscriber Identification Module (Sim) cards to biometrically register their lines by the end of the year.
Two weeks ago TCRA reported that out of the 47 million Sim cards in the market only 42 percent had been registered biometrically.