As expected and we ourselves at malindikenya.net had given as possible, the Communications Authority of Kenya has extended the deadline for SIM phone card registration by six months. Having noticed that most Kenyan users failed to register their SIM cards by the deadline set for today, Friday 15 April, the authority's director general Ezra Chiloba announced that there will be time until next 15 October to register their phone numbers and that this can be done either by going to their phone companies' stores, but also an online registration system that will be launched in these days by Safaricom, after the government-run company, Telkom, had already announced on Thursday 14 that it would allow its users to do so. After October 15, however, there will be no chance to come into compliance and SIM cards will cease to be active.
The announcement in mid-March that SIM cards would be cancelled a month later if they were not registered in the operators' stores, in order to avoid the phenomenon of fraud and misappropriation of numbers and identities linked to them, had created endless queues in every branch to re-transmit their data, and even many tourists and residents currently outside the country had asked us for information on how to do it.