So Senators are pushing for Safaricom to be declared dominant and split into two firms, mobile telephony service regulated by the Communication Authority of Kenya and the M-Pesa division regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya. This is a bad idea, more like punishing success

They said Telkom & Airtel operate at the mercy of Safaricom as they owe it billions of shillings. The question is why are the two firms not paying Safaricom what they owed. This is like saying that if you owe a bank or a fried money, then the bank or the person should be punished

The country has tried to baby sit Airtel & Telkom Kenya for too long, the reality is the two firms are just too incompetent to be helped regardless of the efforts that have been made. Probably it is time to go back and look at the root cause of why they are failing

How I see it, I don't think Safaricom is responsible in anyway. And if that was the case, some of the actions taken before to help Airtel and Telkom Kenya/Orange would have succeeded in some way. Let's take a look..

In 2011, Kenya launched the Mobile number portability allowing subscribers to retain their mobile subscriber numbers whenever they opt to change mobile service providers. That was meant to deepen the level of competition in the sector & in a way help Artel & Orange then

Forward to 2020, the last report by Communication Authority indicated that Safaricom PLC recorded the highest number of in-ports at 208, whereas Airtel Networks Limited and Telkom Kenya Limited recorded 41 and 16 in-ports respectively

As you can see from that latest stats by CA people do not like porting that much, apart from the brief period when NASA called their supporters to boycott Safaricom and a number of people moved to Airtel, Number portability figures have generally been low over time

In 2014 Competition Authority of Kenya ruled against agent exclusivity when Airtel made a complaint about Safaricom M-Pesa agent network. The Central Bank of Kenya followed up with the National Payment Systems Regulations of 2014, which prohibited exclusivity in agent contracts

Airtel having won that case should have shown the world that they could now compete when comes to mobile money. Let's take a look at what happened since then....

Airtel Mobile money subscribers in December 2014 was 3,236,016, forward to March 2020, the number stood at 329,660. Within that Period Airtel lost 2,906,356 subscribers in absolute numbers. A decrease of 90%

Orange Mobile money Active subscribers was 190,129 in December 2014, Orange left & returned the business to its original name Telkom Kenya & the T-Kash Mobile money subscribers stood at 13,333 by end of March 2020. T-Kash lost 176,796 subscribers in that period, a decrease of 93%

For comparison sake, Safaricom Mpesa Active users at the end of December 2014 was 20,150,836, and the number has increased to 28,842,584 by end of March 2020. Safaricom in that period gained 8,691,748 subscribers. A growth of 43%

I see why people are sympathetic the Safaricom competitors but punishing success is not the way to go. I think there are some fundamental problems with Airtel and Telkom Kenya and Safaricom is not one of them