Kenyan opposition wants Safaricom executives probed for alleged 2017 election fraud

Kenyan opposition leaders led by National Super Alliance (NASA) leader Raila Odinga have claimed that Safaricom in collaboration with Safran deliberately manipulated the August 2017 General Elections and delivered a fraudulent victory to Jubilee and Uhuru Kenyatta.

The alliance, in a statement made available to TechMoran, claimed that Safaricom, which was contracted by the IEBC to transmit election results from the KIEMS kits at the polling stations to the IEBC servers never did so.

“Safaricom was (thus) contracted to provide two exclusive VPNs for this purpose. It has since 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,” said the alliance through a statement. “We have the IP addresses and have traced them And the second VPN, was to originate from Safaricom and terminate at the local IEBC server. Both VPNs were fully paid for by the IEBC. However, the VPN from Safaricom terminating locally was never set up.”

NASA adds that the election results from the polling station KIEMS kits were leaving the country but never found their way back to IEBC as required by law but none of the kits under Safaricom’s network ever got their results onto the IEBC’s public web portal.

The alliance further claims that Safaricom’s senior management knew that the results on the IEBC public portal did not come from the KIEMS kits but did not alert authorities of any illegal activities on its systems.

The alliance also claims that Safaricom took no action when IEBC reportedly informed it of its loss of some 100 KIEMS kits.

NASA says it wants Safaricom to tell the country what it did about the stolen KIEMS kits and why they were allowed to continue operating on its network and why the management of Safaricom did not report to the authorities.

NASA claims Mr. Thibaud Rerolle, Director Technical and I.T, Safaricom, Mr. Anthony Gacanja, Head of Technology Security at Safaricom, Mr. Shaka Kwach, Head of Special Projects – in charge of Elections at Safaricom, Mr. Robert Mutai, Head of Technology Strategy, Assurance and Governance at Safaricom, Mr. Farouk Gaffour, Head of Network and Service Operations at Safaricom and Mr. Andrew Masila, Senior Manager, Strategy and Architecture at Safaricom had intimate knowledge or conspired to conceal the alleged election fraud in the August 8 2017 General Elections.

NASA wants the five to be investigated by the country’s Director of Public Prosecutions under the Cyber Crimes Act over the alleged conspiracy between IEBC, Safaricom and Safran/ OT-Morpho.

Below is Safaricom’s response.