Cross your fingers Safaricom users. You could be Ksh. 10,000 richer

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It looks like the apology from Kenya’s biggest telecommunication network did not do much for Kenyans who were left stranded after the network’s mobile money service, M-Pesa experienced an outage during the past weekend.

Safaricom is now facing a possible suit over the outage experienced on Saturday night, December 8, 2018 which the company attributed to a slow database response.

 

 

Although the company apologized to its customers for the service outage, one Martin Ndung’u, a Safaricom subscriber has today given the mobile service provider until Thursday to admit culpability following the disruption of services.

The petitioner further said that the telecommunication company after the admission, should pay its 24 million subscribers Ksh. 10,000 each in reparation for the inconveniences during the downtime.

“Our client proposes that in preparation for the inconvenience, you credit each of the 24 million subscribers with Ksh. 10,000 seeing that you move an average of Ksh. 16.3 billion daily,”  the demand letter reads.

 

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Ndung’u, through his lawyers, Gichuki Waigwa and Associates Advocates, said that if Safaricom does not honour the demand, it will be sued for contravening the Customer Protection Act, 2012.

The petitioner argued that the subscribes incurred costs as they could not pay electricity bills, send money, or place bets with gambling firms.

The notice has been served upon the Board Chairman and Director General of the Communications Authority of Kenya.

Ndung’u is hopeful that the intended ‘class action suit’ will succeed because the ingredients of commonality, adequacy, numerosity and typicality exist.

 

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M-Pesa users were on Saturday night left stranded with some forced to abandon their shopping and others held up in petrol stations after a technical hitch blocked communication through its servers.

Ndung’u in his petition also said that M-Pesa users were embarrassed for being unable to settle bills adding that business deals remained incomplete.

The Ministry of Information and Communications in a statement had also directed the Communication Authority (CA) to work with Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to establish the causes of the hitch.

 

Do you think Ndungu’s petition has a slight chance of succeeding?

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