Safaricom CEO says NASA statement mentioned innocent employees

NASA presidential candiate Raila Odinga (left) and NASA co-principal Musalia Mudavadi.

NAIROBI, KENYA:

NAIROBI, KENYA: National Super Alliance (NASA) leader Raila Odinga on Wednesday rubbished Communications Authority of Kenya’s rebuttal of allegations that Safaricom engaged in electoral malpractices during the August 8 elections.

During a press conference at Okoa Kenya offices in Nairobi, Raila said the Authority was under pressure to defend Safaricom.

On Wednesday Safaricom placed full page in daily newspapers to rebut Raila’s claims that it was involved in the bungling of the polls.

“The Communications Authority is actually in denial acting under pressure from other sources. They are the ones who did actually tell IEBC that it was against the nation’s interest to transfer national data outside the country and that it was necessary for IEBC to have servers in Kenya.”

“Then when they were under a lot of pressure, they changed tune and said it was now right to have servers abroad,” he added.

He said that despite buying space in local dailies on Wednesday, Safaricom had not answered the questions NASA had raised.

Raila wants Safaricom to explain whether or not it routed results to a server in Paris, France, and whether they routed those results back to Kenya.

Alluding to boycotting products of unnamed companies, Raila said NASA will not participate in elections without reforms.

On Tuesday night, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore denied the NASA allegations as he clarified the firm’s role in the last General Election.

“Contrary to what is alleged in the NASA statement, results from the KIEMS kits from Safaricom zones were transmitted and are on the IEBC web portal,” said Mr Collymore.

He explained that Safaricom Ltd was to provide a dedicated secure tunnel to transmit the encrypted data from the KIEMS kits to the IEBC server, also known as a Virtual Private Network or VPN.

The firm was also meant to provide technical support to IEBC before, during and after Election Day, including a dedicated project manager.

In addition, Safaricom was to provide a record of transmission from all the SIM cards provided to IEBC under the contract for purposes of the General Election.

On how transmission was conducted, Collymore explained the country was divided into zones allocated to Safaricom, Telkom Kenya and Airtel Kenya, collectively known as the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

All the KIEMS kits had two SIM cards, with one MNO as a primary provider and the other MNO as a secondary one, he said. Each of the MNOs established a VPN to transmit results from areas where they were either a primary or secondary provider.

“The role of the MNOs was therefore merely to transmit the results from the KIEMS kits to the IEBC servers. In accordance with the contract with IEBC, all the mobile operators connected their VPNs and transmitted the data to the IEBC cloud servers. It was IEBC’s responsibility to transmit results from its servers to the tallying centres and this was publicly available information,” Collymore said.

“Further, it is factually incorrect and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever that Safaricom was informed that some 100 KIEMS kits, as alleged, were stolen from IEBC. “As such, there was nothing required for Safaricom to report and in any event, if any KIEMS kits were stolen, it was the responsibility of IEBC to make such a report and further notify the MNOs to deactivate the SIMs. Safaricom did not receive such a report from IEBC,” he said.

“Safaricom is deeply concerned that the NASA statement has recklessly gone ahead to mention innocent Safaricom staff members, needlessly endangering them and their families. This action is callous and unnecessary,” Collymore said.

“safaricom is ready to face any investigations and/or private prosecutions, brought by any party, on this matter,” read the Safaricom advert.