Safaricom outage: CA pledges rules to avert future disruptions

Proposed regulations to facilitate full interoperability in mobile money services will be ready by end of next month, Communications Authority of Kenya director-general Francis Wangusi said yesterday.

His comments came in the wake of a major network failure by market leader Safaricom on Monday that paralysed calls, SMS and data services for hours, while M-Pesa services were fully restored on Tuesday afternoon.

“We already have the draft report and are now in the process of a stakeholder facilitation and we are hoping that by May we will have fully addressed the issue,” Wangusi told journalists in Nairobi.

He said that Safaricom had seven days to produce a comprehensive report on the debilitating network outage after the giant telco gave a brief response, insisting it was a “technical hitch”.

“In case there is a contravention out of deliberation or negligence, CA will impose a penalty ranging from Sh500,000 to 0.2 per cent of their gross turnover depending on the impact made to the status of the economy of the country and the persistence with which the issue was handled,” said Wangusi.

Safaricom yesterday allowed customers to send cash on M-Pesa free of charge as a “small gesture” to its customers who were hard hit by the network failure.

Wangusi said that there was an urgent need for the authority to implement regulatory interventions to spread some of the risk in the crucial industry to avert future total communication blackout.

The National Treasury in the 2017-18 Budget Policy Statement, first published last November, had warned that M-Pesa service poses a fiscal risk to the economy in case of a failure. A hitch, the Treasury said, would cause widespread disruption in the economy. This will include loss of direct excise tax and corporate tax revenue as well as reduce confidence in the services, the report stated.

“Indeed the regulator and the government at large oversaw this being a security risk. The risk may occur to another player and this will still impact negatively on the progress of such services,” Wangusi said.

He said that the authority is looking at interoperability in the mobile money services that would allow consumers access different service providers from one account. He said that this would help avert risks arising from technical hitches.

The country has six mobile money transfer platforms. They are M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Orange Money, Equitel, Mobikash and Tangaza.

“We are looking towards interoperability of these mobile money platforms such that should there be an incident happening like this to any player, then it would be possible for the services to continue without much interruption,” Wangusi said.

SOURCE:THE STAR