Reputation is a very important thing in this information age.
One company, Safaricom Plc, must really struggle with it. Yesterday was International Women’s Day and Safaricom has today launched a video sharing drive to celebrate women in various endeavours.
It is a good initiative until you understand that those pushing for these have tainted anti-women, anti-youth sentiments running sturdily in their veins.
As Aeon, reminds us, whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities?
Yes, reputation is important in the information age.
We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others.
What reputation does Safaricom Plc have in helping youths in Kenya succeed?
None if you pass it through this prism. Whatever you see around being hawked as good things happening to Kenyans is pure PR bombardment which i’d like to destroy here in a bit.
First, you might argue that Be Your Own Boss (BYOB Blaze) which targets youths has really had a positive impact on that constituency. Wrong.
Safaricom’s Blaze BYOB has targetted the wrong population of Youths; those who come from some well-to-do families, those whose life in campus is not as hard as such instead of focussing on the real youths from the ground.
The Blaze BYOB PR is run on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and to the average thinker, it appears like Safaricom PLc is helping those youths, while it is not.
To all the downtrodden and oppressed youths of Kenya, there’s nothing tangible BYOB Blaze is doing for them.
It is taking youths in circles, make them ignorant of what truly ails them, and when they wake up, they are already old, nothing has changed to better their lives or those of others. It is a scheme that the Kenyan government loves too much, they are this oppression together.
To disenfranchise the lot of young people who make the bulk of the population of this country, so that they cannot interrogate their predicament in the lack of jobs, lack of money, and extra-judicial killings, but instead waste time chasing the wind; a proper chasing of the wind.
Secondly, it is Safaricom Plc among other big Kenyan corporates that have been mentioned in the theft of several intellectual property rights and would be intellectual property rights. First, Safaricom had a portal known as Zindua, where innovators would share their creative innovations with the Telco, most of them were told their innovations wouldn’t go anywhere, they were dismissed only to see the Giant Telco launch a similar product months later. It has happened.
I used the words, ‘would be intellectual property rights’ not by accident. It is because most of these oppressed youths saw a savior in Safaricom, trusted their patents, utility models, and copyrights with it not knowing the processes of registering with Kenya Industrial Property Institute (KIPI) or Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO). This made it easy for the predatory capitalists at Safaricom to steal them and make them their own.
The oppressed youths then suffer double tragedy, lost intellectual property, and they also don’t have money to challenge the giant Telco in the corrupt Kenyan courts.
However, for any big power, there has always been a resistance and a toppling. That time has arrived after nearly 10 years of being unchallenged in the stolen intellectual property rights. Cnyakundi.com knows that Safaricom will fall as has been documented by tweets elsewhere. The new challenger to Safaricom’s thieving ways is a formidable conglomerate of independent-minded Kenyans, fiercely just. The telco will learn a lesson this time around.
Thirdly, the predatory lending that is currently witnessed in Kenya was started in part and made famous by Safaricom through Mshwari. Then Fuliza followed. It is very obscene to see the amounts of interest rates charged by these two.
READ:
- “No love in the connection’ as Safaricom’s con is exposed over revamped Home Fibre
- Safaricom Should Consider Sacking Sylvia Mulinge
- Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa caught stealing
Note that NCBA Bank and Safaricom stole Huduma Namba-like data and used that to launch Mshwari. The story is attached below.
Fourthly, in the matter of reputation in the age of information, the story of Safaricom cannot be told without remembering one Mary Kusa Etale who was killed by a drunk -driver, Safaricom’s Chief Customer officer Sylvia Muthoni Mulinge. It is a miscarriage of justice, one which despite a challenge by a human rights group, the story has stalled. Why would anyone do an out-of-court settlement without going through with charging someone who committed the crime?
In Celebration of International Women’s Day 2021, Safaricom celebrates women and young girls who are taking up space by challenging the status quo to close the gender gap. Keep going beyond and “Kiuka” #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021 #TakeUpSpace pic.twitter.com/8dk6p5WJZA
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) March 8, 2021
Safaricom’s PR in their advertising of Till Numbers, the celebrations of women the whole of this International Women’s day falls flat, the PR has been exposed and it should not be lost on anyone that a family is hurting over the death of a minor, a child who would have grown to become a woman, Mary Kusa Etale should be celebrating her 19th Birthday celebrating International women’s day like Sylvia Mulige, but she is not.
It is for the above reasons and the fact that Safaricom has been using a PR firm, WPP ScanGroup whose founder, Bharat Thakrar was found to have forcefully taken advantage of female staff in his organization during purported business trips, that the PR that Safaricom is churning out this week in support of women, coached women business owners, is null and void. An attempt to hoodwink Kenyans into forgetting their wrongs. Don’t buy it.
Safaricom senior managers, Peter Ndegwa and Sylvia Mulinge and board Chair Michael Joseph, the Mr 10 percent, should resign.
The PR has been deconstructed. Periodt.
