The Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) has asked the National Super Alliance to file formal complaints over alleged illegal acts committed by mobile service provider, Safaricom, during the transmission of results of the August 8 presidential contest.
In a statement to newsrooms, CAK Director General Francis W. Wangusi said that no cases of transmission failure were reported to the authority.
“In line with our oversight responsibility as the ICT sector regulator, the Authority directed the mobile operators to report any cases of transmission failure to us. No cases of transmission failure were reported to us,” stated Wangusi.
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Wangusi advised politicians to canvass their agenda in a responsible manner in order to avoid putting into jeopardy the country’s biggest investments.
“We urge political actors to canvass their agenda in a responsible manner in order to avoid putting into jeopardy the impressive investment and other gains that Kenya has made in the local ICT sector. In the same vein, we implore politicians to report any alleged election malpractices on the part of industry players to the relevant law enforcement agencies instead of engaging in blanket ‘lynching’ of investors in this strategic sector,” said Wangusi.
Nasa had on Tuesday asked Safaricom, which was one of the firms contracted by IEBC to transmit results, to explain why it routed results from the polling stations to a server in France and terminated them there instead of transmitting to the electoral commission’s server in Kenya.
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“It has come to our knowledge that one of these VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) terminated at a cloud server registered in Spain but operated in France under control of OT-Morpho. Both VPNs were fully paid for by IEBC. However VPNs from Safaricom terminating locally were never set up,” complained Nasa flagbearer, Raila Odinga.
In response, Safaricom said that it was not their duty to transmit the results from the cloud servers back to Kenya, rubbishing Nasa allegations.
“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,” said Safaricom’s CEO, Bob Colymore.
This comes a time when Nasa has declared that it will not take part in the October 26 repeat election if its irreducible minimums, which including fresh tendering of the electronic transmission system, which was won by French firm OT-Morpho Safran, are not met.
