NASA urges supporters to boycott Safaricom services

Kenya’s Opposition National  Super Alliance (NASA)  new wing,  National Resistance Movement (NRM) has called on its supporters to shun services and products from telecom Safaricom.

The boycott will include Safaricom services including M-PESA and M-Shwari services. The political coalition says the boycott is an act of economic sabotage against corporates they claim are affiliated to the Jubilee administration.

“This is the beginning of the liberation of our country against corporates that have gone to bed with the Jubilee regime.The companies have denied Kenyans their right to participate in democratic elections,” Suna East MP Junet Mohamed said in a press briefing held at Okoa Kenya’s Nairobi offices.

NASA accused Safaricom of aiding rigging of August poll in favour of President Kenyatta, a claim that Safaricom has denied and dismissed. The coalition leaders had stated that during the 8th August polls Safaricom had been contracted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to transmit election results from the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management Systems (KIEMS) kits at the polling stations to the IEBC servers, but Safaricom’s system never relayed results to IEBC’s public web portal.

NASA leaders further claimed that the data that was to be conveyed via Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to ensure that there was no tampering with the results before they reached the servers, one of the VPNs was 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.

The move to boycott products was initiated on October 25^th a day before the repeat presidential polls. NASA leader Raila Odinga said the coalition would be making public the names of corporations whose products his supporters should boycott.

Mr Odinga said that the names will be released on a weekly basis in a national campaign of defiance against an “illegitimate governmental authority and non-cooperation with all its organs”.

The coalition also asked its supporters to boycott use of other products like milk processor Brookside and fast goods manufacturer Bidco Kenya.