Burundi’s Ministry of Finance, Budget and Digital Economy has spent the past three and a half months pushing every mobile user in the country, citizens, foreigners, tourists, refugees and asylum seekers alike, to register their SIM and eSIM cards with a valid form of identification. The stated goals are familiar ones across African telecom regulation: tighten national security, cut down on consumer fraud and make subscribers accountable for the numbers registered in their names. Since the mandate took effect in mid-June, the country’s Telecommunications Regulatory and Control Agency, ARCT, has built a real-time interconnection between operators and state regulators so registration can be monitored as it happens, with authority to inspect telecom servers on-site to confirm compliance.
The irony is that the rollout itself has become fertile ground for fraud. Nadine Nduwumukama told Connecting Africa she received an urgent call directing her to register for a passport she needed for work travel, paid 800,000 Burundian francs, worth about $265, and only later discovered the real fee is 300,000 francs, roughly $100, and that the number calling her had never belonged to Burundi’s Commissioner General of Immigration. Chantal Ndayizamba had already registered her SIM, three times over, yet kept receiving threatening text messages warning her number would be blocked unless she registered again. Both are the kind of confusion that spreads easily when a government mandate, a registration deadline and public anxiety about losing phone access all land at once, and scammers have been quick to exploit exactly that mix.
Getting registered in the first place hasn’t been straightforward either. Kangwiza Languide described spending more than two days in line with children and household chores waiting at home, long enough that she simply gave up registering her other SIM cards altogether. François Kagabo, who uses three SIM cards across different operators, said he paid 10,000 Burundian francs, about $3, to get just one of them registered and walked away from the rest rather than repeat the experience. Some of that friction comes from a legitimate channel: independent agents who sell SIM cards, airtime and mobile money transfers on behalf of operators do charge for registration help. But locals and a digital rights activist who spoke to Connecting Africa also describe opportunists working the long queues near registration centres, charging desperate, waiting Burundians for a service regulators intend to be free.
The rules themselves are detailed enough to explain some of the slowdown. Every SIM user must appear in person, with the only exemptions for organisations and VIPs, while diplomatic mission staff apply in writing to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and have their assigned number tied to a tax identification number. Minors can hold a SIM only at a parent or guardian’s request, gain the right to register one in their own name at 16, and must re-register once they turn 18. Operators must retain customer data for at least five years, and any SIM that sits inactive for six months faces deactivation, with its number freed up for reassignment after a year. Each of those rules adds a document, a visit or a verification step for a population already standing in line.
Even registration itself doesn’t fully close the loophole it’s meant to close. Pierre Ngabonziza, a Burundian entrepreneur who has spent a decade buying SIM cards in his own name for the carpenters, guards and other staff he employs, says more than ten of those numbers are still active today in the hands of people who no longer work for him, each one still legally his. Digital rights activist Prime Nkezumukama told Connecting Africa that the most frequent scam targets are people chasing scholarships, jobs abroad, passports, driver’s licences and property titles, and alleged that some scam calls trace back to prisoners who hold onto phones they are not authorised to use behind bars, and even, by his account, to police agents complicit in the schemes. Those last claims come from one activist’s telling and haven’t been independently verified here, but they point to a harder truth that registration alone can’t fix: a SIM card registered in one person’s name is only as trustworthy as whoever is actually holding it.
ARCT director general Samuel Muhizi says no properly registered SIM will be blocked and that 70% of the country’s cards have already been re-registered, a pace that, if accurate, would put Burundi ahead of some regional peers. The Republic of Congo’s telecom regulator, running a similar drive, reported only 9.13% of SIMs registered in 2025, down from 13.2% the year before, and had to grant operators a further two-month extension with revenue-based penalties attached. Kenya has had to extend its own SIM registration deadline too. No African country running this exercise has managed it cleanly on the first attempt, and Burundi’s 70% figure, like the others, has not been independently verified beyond the regulator’s own word.
Burundi enters this drive from a weaker starting position than most of its neighbours. The country counted 8.79 million active mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025, equal to 60.7% of the population and the lowest mobile penetration rate in East Africa, with online penetration at just 11.1% and many connections limited to voice and SMS. That context matters alongside a separate move by President Évariste Ndayishimiye, who proposed in May 2026 that civil servants be banned from using mobile phones during work hours entirely, arguing the devices were cutting into the workday. Taken together, the mobile phone ban proposal and the registration drive’s rocky rollout read less like isolated missteps and more like a government still working out whether it sees mobile connectivity as infrastructure to build on or a risk to be managed, in a country that can least afford to get that balance wrong.
