Cable vandals to face stiffer charges from 2011

By Macharia Kamau

Cable vandals will face stiffer penalties beginning next year, after the current law is said to be lenient on offenders is reviewed.

Information and Communication Minister, Samuel Poghisio, said the ministry is in the course of reviewing the Communications law to make cable vandalism an economic crime. He said the amendments to the Act would be in place in the next six months.

"We are keen on passing legislation with stiffer penalties for vandals... The ministry is pushing for the law to regards vandalism as an economic crime, and expect this will happen within the first half of 2011,"

Cable vandalism currently attracts a jail sentence of five years or a fine of Sh1 million as per the Kenya Communications (Amendment) Act, but players have in the recent past called for the criminalisation of vandalism and stiffer penalties to curb rising vandalism instances.

In this year alone, vandalism on both fibre optic cable and copper networks seen data and voice services fail, while operators say cost of repair and losses due to the cable blackouts easily runs in to billions of shillings.

Poghisio added that the ministry is in talks with the ministry of finance to give ICT players incentives in a bid to deepen the penetration of ICT services, like data use, that are yet to be taken in the huge manner that mobile telephony has.

"We are aware of concerns raised by the industry and are in talks with the Treasury to see what incentives the Government can give players, for instance tax rebates," he said.

Advanced stage

"This should enable the industry to focus on service delivery in rural areas such that people there have the same level of access as people in urban areas do, and this will in turn spur economic growth."

The minister was speaking yesterday when he officially opened an Orange Mega Shop at Telephone House along Kaunda Street. Mickael Ghossein, the chief executive of Telkom Kenya, said the shop is part of the firm’s efforts to improve the quality of its service offering. Other efforts, he said, include recent investments in addition to base transmission stations.

"As consumer demand for modern mobile and broadband services grow, the pressure of building customer relationships and feedback from the market is important," he said.

He also took issue with a recent quality of service assessment undertaken by CCK that said that Orange was among those with poor service offering.