The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has reminded telcos in the country that they must block any subscriber who has not provided their National Identity Number (NIN). The deadline for providing the NIN was February 28. Channels Television reported that the NCC considers linking SIM cards to NIN numbers to be a matter of “critical national security”.
It is true that bad actors, including terrorists, will exploit anonymous access to networks. However, it is also true that the privacy of consumers is eroded by demands that they identify themselves in order to have a phone or internet service. Nigeria has been ramping up the ability to use comms networks as a means of collecting taxation from the general population. Their approach is not much different to that found in some other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, although they awarded the contract to ‘assure’ these taxes to the politician who proposed the change in law that made this deal possible, instead of handing the monopoly to a foreign firm like Global Voice Group (GVG). Denying people access to communications unless their identity has been verified is vital for taxation via networks to succeed.
Nigerian authorities are not alone in arguing that the anonymous use of networks can be a threat to national security. Terrorism is real. There are other dangers too. One of those dangers is that the definition of the threats to national security might expand in ways that most Nigerians have not imagined. Examining events in other countries helps to elucidate the threats that may not be properly considered otherwise. For example, Ghana has an extensive history of ‘assuring’ taxes collected via networks, and will have been one of the countries examined as a role model when the NCC decided to implement a similar approach.
Most of Ghana’s history of assuring telecoms tax revenues has been mired in controversy about the huge amounts paid to private sector firms tasked with implementing assurance technology. GVG receives USD18mn per year as part of a long-term contract to assure Ghana’s telecom and mobile money revenues, so there was uproar when it was discovered the Ghanian government allocated a further USD40mn in the national budget for an unspecified outside contractor to do further assurance work in relation to the introduction of new mobile money taxes. Opposition to the new taxes was so strong that punches were thrown in the national parliament. Some of the strength of feeling can be explained by the High Court ordering GVG and the government to stop violating the privacy rights of mobile money customers earlier in the year. This did not discourage the government from employing GVG to manage Ghana’s national SIM database. And just days after that brawl in parliament, a minister in the Ghanian government claimed that leakages in the collection of mobile money taxes pose a threat to national security.
The global communications industry pays insufficient attention to developments in Africa, even when it should be learning from them. This is based on the erroneous prejudice that other regions are more advanced. Not all innovation requires the outlay of large amounts of money. African comms providers and regulators have often been at the forefront of global innovation since the turn of the century. They used mobile networks to bring banking services to unbanked customers in ways that others later copied. More recently I have noticed a spate of announcements about telcos in various countries introducing APIs so banks can check if a customer changed their SIM recently, as a means to guard against SIM swap fraud. None of these announcements refers to the African telcos that pioneered this control. It was the popularity of mobile money that prompted African telcos to take a lead with enhanced anti-fraud controls whilst the rest of the world lagged behind. However, not all innovation is an unalloyed good. African countries are currently leading the way with the use of networks to tax ordinary citizens. International bodies like the United Nations treat this as desirable, but a UN official living in New York does not have to live with all the consequences.
Turning networks into mechanisms to collect tax has profound implications for privacy and individual freedom. We should all be learning from actual events occurring in Africa, instead of purely theorizing about the implications of similar plans involving identity verification, networked money and taxation. Nigeria is one of the biggest countries in the world, and is unusual because it will keep growing after some other big countries have passed their peak and enter into decline. A story about Nigeria’s comms regulator forcing phone users to share their identity numbers may seem trivial, but it is part of a narrative that is likely to become relevant to most of the world’s population within the next few decades.
