<img src="http://www.cio.co.ke/images/stories/article_images/apr-11/safaricoms_nzioka_waita.jpg" mce_src="images/stories/article_images/apr-11/safaricoms_nzioka_waita.jpg" alt="" title="Safaricom's Director of Corporate Affairs, Nzioka Waita. Safaricom is questoning the role of Porting Access as the custodian of the mobile number portability database. " class="caption" width="396" align="left" height="264">About one month after the commencement of mobile number portability (MNP) in Kenya, Safaricom has announced that it has taken legal action in the form of a law suit against Porting Acess and its CEO, Patrick Musimba. At the same time, the mobile operator accused the company of favouring Airtel who Safaricom is accusing of funding some of Porting Access activity and appearing to run the process on behalf of Porting Access. Musimba has also been accused of attempting to sabotage an ongoing audit between Porting Access, Safaricom and Airtel. The accusations were made by Nzioka Waita, Safaricom’s director of corporate affairs on Tuesday afternoon. Nzioka also disputed the figure of more than 50,000 ported subcribers that Musimba gave recently in a TV interview, saying that the figures represented the number of SMS sent to the porting firm and not actual ports. Safaricom gives the actual ports from all operators as 28, 140 with the firm having lost 13, 525 subscribers to rivals. “Safaricom has today instructed its lawyers to institute legal proceedings against Porting Access and the person of Mr Musimba for what we believe is an act of defamation and sort of economic sabotage against Safaricom Limited. We strongly object to the impression created by Bharti-Airtel and indeed by some commission hunters that the single measure of the success or otherwise of MNP in Kenya is how many subscribers port from other operators to Bharti-Airtel,” said Nzioka.

Nzioka also said that the process had been faced with various technical challenges and hitches with the regulator – the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) – ordering an audit between Porting Access, Safaricom and Airtel. This was after Airtel and Porting Access both accused Safaricom of sabotaging the porting process.
To Safaricom, the ongoing issues with the porting process are unavoidable as the testing phase of the process was one week long in contrast to 6 to 8 weeks global standard. “As late as this morning, we have received communication from Porting Access BV that they were having technical challenges based on what they cite to be unstable connectivity from their end which are affecting the ability of all operators in the Kenyan space to successfully implement some of the day to day actions related to the MNP process,” adds Nzioka.
Safaricom continues to accuse one of the operators of unethical practices which go against the porting guidelines agreed by all operators. The unethical practices include offering of porting “on the street” away from their outlets, failure to disclose services that the customer would lose on porting, SMS soliciting of new customers from rival networks and non-clearance of outstanding payments such as credit advancement before porting.
While urging CCK to review the role of Porrting Access in the administration of MNP, Safaricom says that they were still support the process, advocating for it to be carried out ethically. The firm says that from research in other markets, it would be expecting most of those who had ported out to port back. Meanwhile, the firm is working on rectifying issues on its network reliability customer care access amongst others in a bid to retain customers.