The move by the government to award Safaricom the security upgrade tender was not received well by some people leading to a motion in parliament that led to the suspension of the said contract. Most of those who opposed the move argued that the security of the country should not be placed on a private firm like Safaricom.
The contract required Safaricom to install CCTV cameras with facial recognition software and link all these cameras with nearly 200 police stations. This was meant to start in the two major towns that are Nairobi and Mombasa before moving to the rest of the country.
The contract was cancelled after parliament moved in requesting a probe into how the contact was awarded to Safaricom.
Safaricom on its part was not very disappointed and even welcomed the probe saying, “In the interests of transparency, Safaricom Limited welcomes the move by the Parliamentary Committee on Security and Administration to scrutinize the deal and we would therefore like to assure Parliament of our full cooperation during life of the probe.”
Safaricom also went ahead to clarify that the system will not run on its commercial network but rather on an independent LTE security communications network. It also added that the management and control of the system will be under the National Police Service and not Safaricom.