Communications Authority affirms not receiving reports on IEBC transmission failures

The Communications Authority of Kenya wants the leadership of the National Super Alliance (NASA) leadership to refrain from public attacks on Safaricom and instead report any issues it may have against the mobile network operator to the police.

In a singed presser, the Mr. Francis Wangusi, Director-General of the Authority stated that public attacks directed to investors in the ICT arena risked eroding confidence among the existing ones and scaring others potential ones in the communications industry.

Wangusi’s statement was prompted by NASA’s leadership that the local mobile telecommunications operators were involved in the manipulation of the August 8th general elections results in favour of Jubilee Party. According to the Director General, the Authority was aware that IEBC contracted the three mobile operators to provide a medium of the end-to-end transmission of election results in line with the Elections (Technology) Regulations, 2017.

“Upon our advice, the country was divided into three zones and each of the three mobile operators was assigned one region to support the transmission systems of the IEBC.  In each of the three zones, an additional mobile operator was assigned the responsibility of providing back up services in case of technology failure,” he added.

Mobile Operators

Mr. Wangusi further added that the Authority directed the mobile operators to report any cases of transmission failure and no cases of transmission failure were reported.

As the country prepares for the repeat presidential poll, Wangusi called on Kenyans not to lose faith and confidence in technology since ICTs have been successfully deployed and embraced in all facets of life in the country, including banking, business, education, health, agriculture and government services.

“Elections are no exception and the Authority is confident that ICTs can be deployed successfully to support this important national activity. The country stands to benefit in a big way if the current levels of investment and adoption of ICT are sustained. It is therefore the responsibility of all well-meaning Kenyans to support investors in the sector and to underline public confidence in ICTs,” he added.

“Elections are no exception and the Authority is confident that ICTs can be deployed successfully to support this important national activity. The country stands to benefit in a big way if the current levels of investment and adoption of ICT are sustained. It is therefore the responsibility of all well-meaning Kenyans to support investors in the sector and to underline public confidence in ICTs,”

Francis Wangusi, Director General – Communications Authority, Kenya

He also urged 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, he implored 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.

The move by CA comes after NASA leader Raila Odinga on Tuesday said that Safaricom was 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 alleged Safaricom’s system never relayed results to IEBC’s public web portal.

He further added 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.

Safaricom has since distanced itself from the claims by NASA. In a statement by Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, Mr. Collymore stated that Safaricom’s role in last general election was to provide  a dedicated secure tunnel to transmit the encrypted data from the KIEMs kits to the IEBC server.

He added that the Telco Giant was required to provide technical support to the IEBC before, during and after the general election day including a dedicated project manager and provide a record of transmission from all the SIM Cards provided to the IEBC under the contract for purposes of the General Election.

For further clarity Mr. Collymore added that the country was divided into zones, allocated to Safaricom, Telkom Kenya and Airtel Kenya, collectively known as the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). All KIEMs kits had two SIM cards with one MNO as primary provider and the other MNO as secondary. 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 kit 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,” he said.

On the issue around the theft of 100 KIEMS kits Mr. Collymore said, there was nothing required for Safaricom to report and in any event, if any KIEMS kits were stolen it the responsibility of IEBC to make such a report and further notify the MNOs to deactivate the SIMs.

He added that the telco was deeply concerned that the NASA statement has recklessly gone ahead to mention innocent Safaricom staff members needlessly endangering them and their families saying that the action is callous and unnecessary.