A visibly angry Safaricom Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore today said he will not hesitate to deal with any politician who causes harm to the company’s staff members.
He was responding to National Super Alliance (NASA) presidential candidate Raila Odinga who has claimed six Safaricom staff members helped steal his victory in the August 8 elections.
Collymore who was speaking at the sidelines of the launch of an upgraded Lipa-M-Pesa service said Raila should have been brave enough to confront him with the allegations on how Safaricom had rigged the elections.
“If someone wants to accuse anyone, let them accuse me because I am leader of the team. Don’t accuse any of innocent members of staff,” he said.
The CEO said Raila’s move to name six Safaricom employees in his allegation had forced the company to provide them with 24 hour security.
“I don’t think that dragging commercial organizations into the political environment is a smart thing to do right now. People must go and fight political agendas and not drag innocent corporations into this,” he said.
Last week, Raila claimed that Safaricom had selected a team of six employees to work with French biometric company, Safran-Morpho in order to manipulate election results.
But Safaricom all the three leading telecommunication companies including Telkom Kenya and Airtel were involved in the election results transmission.
It is not clear why Raila specifically picked on Safaricom which has the widest infrastructural network while the three telcos were hired by Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) on one contract.