Why Safaricom has ‘deactivated’ lawyer Ahmednassir’s simcard
Safaricom appears to have lived up to its threat of switching off unregistered lines on its network.
The giant telecommunications firm had vowed to deactivate lines that had not been registered by October 15, 2022.
And a day later, prominent lawyer and blogger claimed his line had been switched off despite being a loyal customer for more than two decades.
After 2 and half decades of being a loyal customer of @Safaricom_Care they unceremoniously switched off my line this sunday…tomorrow I will move to one of the competitors and will NEVER use their service again.I knew that short man will burn to ashes the House built by Michael!
— Ahmednasir Abdullahi SC (@ahmednasirlaw) October 16, 2022
Ahmednassir is considered among the best and prominent lawyers having represented among others, President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 election petitions.
He is also known to have deep pockets and never shies from sharing controversial comments on topical and political matters on his Twitter page that boasts more than a million followers.
The Communications Authority (CA) asserted that sim cards whose registration details would not have been updated would be deregistered on Saturday, October 15, 2022.
The deadline was moved from April 15, 2022, following hue and cry from the general public.
CA said the fresh registration process was necessary so as to to weed out fraudsters from telecommunication companies’ databases.
Safaricom, Airtel Kenya and Telkom had set Saturday, October 15, 2022, as the deadline for SIM card registration with any case of non-compliance with the SIM Card Registration Regulations 2015 by either the operators or subscribers attracting immediate penalties as laid out by law.
Also read: We won’t extend deadline for SIM card registration, warns CA
The regulator also warned consumers against blaming the authority for disconnecting their SIM cards after the lapse of the deadline.
However, the Assistant Director of Telecoms Licensing and Compliance at CA Liston Kirui had said that deactivated lines could be re-registered giving a disclaimer that re-registering after the deadline lapses would be more tasking.
“After the 15th October deadline, subscribers whose lines will have been deactivated will still have an opportunity to re-register. Of course, they will have more to do after being deactivated,” he said adding that the process would be longer, compared to what was required to re-register.
“Operators are not going to stop the exercise because of the October 15 deadline. We expect them to continue with the process,” he said.