Director-General at Competition Authority of Kenya
Kenya has been in the midst of a telecommunications companies versus regulators struggle for some time, but that battle appears to be coming to an end after the country’s regulators announced they inked a new memorandum of understanding aimed at settling the issue of who has the power to monitor abuse in the telecom sector.
Wang’ombe Kariuki, the director-general Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK), said that “the MoU will enable it and the Communications Authority (CA) to outline how they operate in areas of overlap and convergence.”
The two regulators have in the recent past engaged in a supremacy battle on procedures and processes for declaring an operator dominant in the telecommunications sector.
In March, the CA published a set of eleven regulations, including Fair Competition and Equality of Treatment Regulations, that would see any telecommunication or broadcasting firm that controls a 51 percent market share automatically declared dominant, or a monopoly and could face break up.
The regulations are meant to come into force by mid-June, but the competition watchdog has refrained from declaring any such operator “dominant” before a number of factors are established.
For instance, such a firm must have the market power to raise prices without suffering a drop in sales. Safaricom, which controls 67.4 percent of the mobile telephony market, has been at the center of the fights between the two watchdogs.
It is unclear if Kenya will force Safaricom to split or if other actions are to be taken.
Joseph Mayton
