The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) will begin switching off more than 2.5 million counterfeit mobile phones tonight, and has assured the Kenyan public that the process will be a smooth one.
CCK Director General Francis Wangusi told HumanIPO that concerns that the regulatory body would erroneously switch off legal phones were baseless.
“Our systems are updated on a daily basis and the list we have provided to the network service providers is that of handsets that did not reflect the serial number that is normally given to the GSMA,” he said. “These are the only phones that will be switched off. There will be no notification to the individuals that their phones have gone off but it will just happen.”
Commentators have previously raised concerns that the CCK systems and information are insufficient to handle the switch-off, and that users with perfectly legal phones may find themselves disconnected.
But Wangusi moved to end these fears, assuring mobile users that if their phone is legal it will not be affected. He affirmed that the CCK system was effective enough to detect counterfeit mobiles without genuine ones being accidentally disconnected.
He said that once the CCK’s job in detecting fake phones was done it will be up to the operator’s to disconnect the phones in question or face fines.
“Our work is to type-approve, the rest of the action we leave it to the mobile operators,” he said. “Since we began the awareness campaign, sales have dropped of these fake handsets, but we are also working with relevant authorities on how to nab the one that are still in circulation.”
“We also found out from data in our systems that the number of all these counterfeit phone users are below 10 percent, so the service providers did not have a lot of issues regarding losing subscribers.”
“one of the reasons why the CCK did not put a hand on the importation of these handsets is because most of them came in through the Kenya-somali boarder. very few handsets were brought in through the ports.”
According to CCK statistics, more than 2.5 million counterfeit handsets are still in use even after a two month awareness campaign. Safaricom will switch off over 600,000 phones subscribers.
“Within 15 hours from midnight of the date announced we will have completed the exercise,” said Bob Collymore, Safaricom CEO. “This is because it would be impossible to push a button and remove all of them at the stroke of midnight.
