ZICTA Plays Hardball with Telecoms

It’s been a hectic period filled with the fear of losing your number after the SIM registration period, yes?

Well, ZICTA has understood people’s complaints and ordered all 3 mobile service providers to clean house and organize toll free lines specifically to handle SIM registration queries.

The registration exercise was originally supposed to end on 31st December but was extended because things were not concluded as expected. Many customers still had unregistered sim cards and there were some errors during the data capturing such as wrong names or mismatched numbers. Talk about randomness…

There were also some people who had registered before the deadline but still had their numbers deactivated. Those make a huge fraction of the 2,215,376 SIM cards that have been deactivated from a total number of 8,235,991 which had been registered following the end of the SIM card registration exercise. That’s more than 26 per cent of all consumers country wide!

ZICTA Public Relations officer Ngabo Nankonde said they have had their eye on all 3 providers lately and though anomalies are expected, any service provider found with levels of errors beyond the acceptable will be forced to re-run the system. Really? That will be hectic if it means people have to go back and re-register their cards. Especially considering that the queues were long and some data entry agents at some service centres were either slow or just rude.

So, if you want to complain about any issues regarding your SIM registration, you can now call 101 on MTN and ZAMTEL, and 4338 on Airtel. Let’s hope this issue gets sorted out and get to now enjoy whatever benefits come with our respective service providers through this KYC (Know Your Customer) initiative.

If you feel like your complaints are not being handled according to your expectations, ZICTA welcomes your grievances on the ZICTA complaints toll-free line on 7070 or send an e-mail to complaints@zicta.zm

Good luck to all 3 service providers and may the most efficient successfully finish the exercise first!