ICT Minister tasked to produce a report on the ongoing sim card disconnections.

The minister of ICT and National guidance Hon. Chris Baryomunsi will present a comprehensive report next Tuesday on the floor of parliament regarding the ongoing operations being executed by the telecom companies of switching off all simcards falling victim of varifications.

This comes after the Kampala central division member of parliament Hon. Muhammad Nsereko expressed his concerns regarding the matter during today’s plenary sitting.

"as we speak we have over 700,000 Ugandans and more who are living in abroad but do not have access to these services but you've been using their functional simcards  for either carrying out remetences at home or storage of their money on their mobile wallets what we call the mobile money wallets.Now recently many have got communication of disruption in services to the effect that their simcards are nolonger fully functional namely; to communication and operation of the mobile money wallet now some where at a period when they were supposed to remet for school fees for their children and others for their own operational businesses.” He said.

According to Nsereko some citizens that have gone for revarification of their simcards, their mobile money has gone missing from their accounts upon revarification, with some being instructed by the telecom companies to pay an extra fee for the services.

Responding to these claims of missing money on some of the accounts of the mobile money users, the state minister for finance Hon. Henry Musasizi trashed the claims, stressing that all money belonging to Ugandan citizens has been entrusted and is being monitored by the Bank of Uganda.

"R.t Hon. Speaker in the year 2020 this house enacted a law called national payment system Act. This act established a platform where all electronic money is regulated by Bank of Uganda. I wish to alay the fears of Hon. Nsereko that those who are being cut off, their money is being lost. That is not the case coz all this money settles in bank of Uganda.” He revealed 

The minister of ICT and National guidance Hon. Chris Baryomunsi highlighted on the reasons as to why the exercise is being executed by the telecom companies a number of which included security purposes.

"the move is to eliminate cyber crimes which are committed using telecommunications because you find there are people who have simcards and they're not registered in their names and go ahead to use them to commit crimes. So we call upon the members of the public to co-operate with the government to make sure that we have simcards registered.” Said Baryomunsi

The minister for ICT was later on given time by the speaker of parliament R.t Hon. Anita Among to come back on Tuesday with a comprehensive report on the matter.

According to the data from the UCC, Uganda has more than 30 million registered SIM cards, but approximately 2 percent of them are classified as non-regularized, totaling around 600,000 subscribers.