Tuesday’s major downtime on Safaricom’s M-Pesa system in Kenya is a stark reminder of the risks associated with overreliance on a single mobile payment service.

The outage, which lasted for two hours, had widespread implications, affecting over 800,000 M-Pesa agents, payment merchants, and disrupting critical government services.

This incident highlights the vulnerability of businesses and government services that heavily depend on Safaricom’s M-Pesa platform.

The lack of prior notice about the scheduled system maintenance exacerbated the inconvenience for the 32 million M-Pesa customers.

The disruption impacted various sectors, including e-Citizen services, supermarkets, fuel stations, hospitals, pharmacies, and educational institutions, causing chaos at payment points and hindering daily transactions.

The government’s directive to migrate to the e-Citizen platform and use M-Pesa for revenue collection further underscores the systemic risks associated with such a dominant player.

The outage left citizens stranded, revealing the urgent need for full mobile money interoperability among all telcos.

The Central Bank of Kenya’s push to break up Safaricom’s dominance is justified, as it would provide alternative payment options and reduce the potential losses incurred during technical hitches.

This incident should serve as a catalyst for accelerating efforts towards a more diversified and robust digital payment ecosystem in Kenya, ensuring that citizens and businesses are not disproportionately affected by the shortcomings of a single service provider