The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) on prevention and subsequent arrest of crimes in the telecom industry.
The partnership is intended to tackle crimes such as telecom equipment vandalism and fraudulent registration of Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards among others.
Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, who addressed a gathering of senior management staff of NSCDC in the South West Zone, at an exclusive workshop organised by the Commission, hailed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) sealed between the agency and the Commission, for which the gathering was to explore how the Corps will deploy enabling laws, subsidiary legislations, and extant guidelines to arrest any form of criminality in the sector.
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Danbatta, who was represented at the workshop by the Director, Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement at the Commission, Ephraim Nwokonneya, said, over the years, the NCC has been working with relevant law enforcement agencies, and in particular the NSCDC, towards protecting telecom sector from all kinds of criminal behaviour.
“Through despicable activities that are criminal and totally at variance with national security concerns of the government, the deviant elements in our midst have been acting to undermine efforts put in place to consolidate the gains of the sector,” the EVC said.
Danbatta declared that “These criminal activities include theft and vandalism of telecommunications infrastructure, the illegal use of fraudulently-registered Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards, operating without license, illegal call masking, and so on.”
He said while the NSCDC officers have been of tremendous assistance, the objective of the workshop was to constantly engage and update them on new trends and existing regulations, requiring concerted efforts for their implementation towards enhancing sanity in the telecom sector.