Safaricom responds after Raila Odinga drags them to poll dispute

On Tuesday 26 September, National Super Alliance (NASA) leader Raila Odinga linked Kenya's leading telecommunication firm, Safaricom into August 8 election rigging.

Raila said that Safaricom was contracted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to transmit election results from the polling stations to a server in France instead of transmitting them to Kenya Integrated Electoral Management Systems (KIEMS) kits.

"It is a matter of public record that Safaricom was contracted by IEBC to transmit election results from the Kenya Integrated Election Management (Kiems) kits at polling stations to the IEBC servers," alleged Mr Odinga.

“It has come to our knowledge that one of these VPNs terminated at a cloud server registered in Spain but operated from France under the control of OT-Morpho. Both VPNs were fully paid for by the IEBC. However, the VPN from Safaricom terminating locally was never set up” Said Raila.

“Consequently, results from the polling station KIEMS kits left the country but never found their way back to IEBC. None of the kits under Safaricom’s network ever got their results onto the IEBC’s public web portal. One thing Jubilee and IEBC refuse to disclose and address even as they claim to be making changes to the electoral system is the role the local telecommunication firms, particularly Safaricom Kenya, played, in collaboration with Safran in manipulating the August elections in favor of Jubilee and Uhuru Kenyatta,” continued Raila.

However, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore denied the NASA allegations and clarified what their main role was in the August 8 poll.

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“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 the Safaricom CEO.

“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 centers and this was publicly available information,” said Mr Collymore.

Safaricom also released a statement on the twitter handle to respond to NASA’s allegations;

Our position statement. pic.twitter.com/0YzBA6Ne3p— Safaricom Limited (@SafaricomLtd) September 26, 2017