DICT: Low SIM registration turnout not due to lack of gov’t IDs

By: Daphne Galvez - 2 years ago

Secretary Ivan John Enrile Uy of the Department of Information and Communications Technology FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — The low SIM card registration turnout is not because of the lack of government IDs but because of “hard-headed” Filipinos who have a “bad habit” of delaying their tasks until “the last minute.”

Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Ivan Uy made this comment on Tuesday after the government extended the SIM card registration for 90 more days.

The DICT had initially balked on extending the April 26 deadline only to eventually recommend it to the President.

Uy said their initial reluctance to extend the deadline had a “very positive effect” since there was a surge of registrants in the past two weeks with one million a day average from the previous 100,000 a day.

“Kung nag-announce ng extension nang napaaga, hindi tayo aabot ng quota natin. Clearly, matitigas lang ang ulo ng ating mga kababayan. They’re hoping for an extension kaya we had to adopt a stronger stance against these extensions,” he said in a Palace briefing.

(If we earlier announced an extension of registration, we wouldn’t have reached our quota. Clearly, Filipinos are just hard-headed. They’re hoping for an extension so we had to adopt a stronger stance against these extensions.)

He added that the low turnout of registration is also not because of lack of government IDs but of the “bad habit of delaying to the last minute the compliance to the law.”

“In the last two weeks, we were averaging more than a million SIM card registrations per day. So that just goes to show that the issue is not really limited ID or anything; it’s just our bad habit of delaying to the last minute the compliance to the law,” the DICT official said.

Uy said President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. on Tuesday approved the DICT’s recommendation to extend SIM registration period because 20 million SIM cards remain unregistered.