Safaricom insists that its contract with electoral body did not cover technical design and management.
The firm said its contract with IEBC covered the supply of 17,900 mobile handsets for its officials and provision of Internet connection.
Safaricom has absolved itself from blame for the technical glitch that slowed down the tallying and release of General Election results.
The firm said its contract with the electoral body covered the supply of 17,900 mobile handsets for the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) officials and provision of Internet connection.
“Safaricom did not and does not have any role in the technical design, management or specification of the servers, the mobile software application nor the graphic presentation of the results data used by the IEBC,” said Safaricom’s chief executive officer Bob Collymore.
IEBC had contracted Google, IFES, Next Technologies, Airtel, and Lantech to provide other services related to transmission of the results.
Technical hitches at IEBC servers Wednesday forced the commission to start tallying presidential ballots afresh, this time manually, heightening anxiety over who would be Kenya’s fourth president.
By 8.30pm on Tuesday IEBC had only announced provisional results for 30 per cent of the of the 31,150 polling stations despite vote counting having been completed in most stations.
IEBC chairman Issack Hassan blamed congestion for the slow transmission of results, at one time letting out that the servers did not have adequate capacity.
“We experienced a network problem that resulted in slow transmission of results and fixed the problem at around 9.30pm (Monday) night,” Mr Hassan said on Tuesday.
Mr Collymore said Safaricom’s mobile and virtual private network had remained robust with 100 per cent uptime in all areas where coverage was to be provided.
The mobile firm said the traffic on the Virtual Private Network VPN provided to IEBC did not exceed 3.5 Mbps at any time compared to the 3,000 Mbps traffic on its network at any one time.
“The total number of mobile devices provisioned to be used by the IEBC polling staff to relay results on the Safaricom VPN was 32,000 or 2 per cent of the 1.5 million devices connected to our data network at any given time,” Mr Collymore said.
Mr Hassan said the commission had called chief agents of the eight presidential aspirants and their IT experts for a meeting over the slow transmission of results.
On Monday, Kenyans turned out in massive numbers to vote in a General Election described as the most important in the country’s 50-year history.
Despite multiple attacks on security forces that left a dozen people dead, the prevailing mood was one of relief as millions waited peacefully and patiently to cast their vote.
For most, epic queues and computer glitches were a bigger headache than the anticipated ethnic clashes.
