As the August retirement date for Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore fast approaches, Kenya’s telecommunications giant Safaricom is now at the center of country’s power play and a key ingredient to 2022 politics.
The crucial role that safaricom plays in every elections time in Kenya is now attracting a strong tussle in the Jubilee goverment piting Uhuru and his deputy William Ruto.
Bob Collymore will be stepping down from his role this August, citing health reasons and the government has begun lobbying for Kenyan to the country’s CEO, a position that has always been held by foreigners since the telecommunications giant was founded in 1997 as a fully owned subsidiary of Telkom Kenya.
Safaricom had intentions of having another foreign national to head the company but the government has fiercely objected this move saying it was time for a Kenyan to head the telecommunications company, citing an agreement supporting the appointment of a Kenyan as CEO, adopted at a shareholder meeting in 2017.
Unknown to many, Safaricom always provides major infrastructure during the country’s general elections, as witnessed in 2013 and 2017 and it is likely to do the same, prompting the major interest by country’s political players.
An anonymous source told Daily Active in confidence that while President Uhuru has confidence in a former bank CEO from Mt Kenya region to take over from Bob Collymore, DP Ruto is opposed to the move and is lobbying to have one of his close allies, a former ambassador to be the Safaricom CEO.
In 2017, Safaricom signed an agreement with the IEBC to relay the results from the KIEMs device to the IEBC server. It would later emerge that the company may have been compromised during the transmission of the results and in effect leading to the disputed 2017 polls.