Every other year, it seems, Kenya’s most admired company ends up in the headlines, and not for another dazzling innovation. Safaricom, the telecom giant that practically built Kenya’s digital economy, has once again dismissed more than a hundred employees for fraud.
Yes, again.
According to Safaricom’s 2024 sustainability report, 113 staff members were sacked this year for “fraud and policy breaches.” The year before, it was 95. Go back a few years, and you’ll find the same story in different packaging: insider scams, SIM-swap fraud, data leaks, and the quiet reassignment of staff.
And it begs a question that’s becoming harder to ignore: Why does this keep happening at Kenya’s most most celebrated company?
The cracks beneath the innovation
Safaricom is not just another telecom. It’s the bloodstream of Kenya’s economy. More than 33 million Kenyans depend on M-Pesa — its mobile money service — to send cash, buy food, pay school fees, even take out microloans. The company’s annual revenues, hovering near $3 billion, rival the GDP of some small African nations.
When Safaricom sneezes, the entire economy catches a cold.
So when the company quietly admits that dozens of its own employees have been fired for enabling fraud, it’s not just an HR issue. It’s a national concern.
Some of these cases involve SIM-swap fraud, one of the simplest yet most devastating scams in Kenya. Others are theft of M-Pesa agent float. The playbook goes like this: a fraudster convinces a Safaricom agent to transfer someone else’s phone number to a new SIM card. Suddenly, your calls, texts, and mobile money PINs are theirs. Within minutes, your account is wiped clean.
It’s the kind of crime that thrives on insider cooperation, and that’s where the worry begins.
A pattern that repeats like clockwork
In 2018, Safaricom fired 33 employees for aiding fraudsters. In 2020, 28 more were shown the door. In 2023, the number jumped to 95. Now we’re at 113.
Different years. Same problem.
To be fair, Safaricom insists it’s doing everything right. “Throughout FY25, we strengthened our fraud detection systems, reaffirmed our commitment to data protection, and expanded ethical training for staff and partners,” the company says in its latest report.
It has rolled out automated detection tools, introduced biometric verification for SIM replacements, and expanded whistle-blowing channels.
All good things — but clearly, not enough. Technology can only go so far, if your internal culture is weak or your staff are under pressure to perform, that’s where cracks form. Fraud is not just a technical issue. It’s a human one.
And Safaricom, for all its tech sophistication, is still a human company.
A culture of quiet complicity
Talk to former employees — off the record, of course — and you’ll hear the same refrain: fraud doesn’t always start with malicious intent. Sometimes, it starts with desperation.
Entry-level Safaricom staff, especially contractors or agents working in rural areas, handle high volumes of customer data with relatively low pay. They are the frontline gatekeepers of Kenya’s digital identity — yet they’re also the easiest to tempt.
“When your salary is KSh140,000 and someone offers you KSh1,000,000 to look the other way on a SIM swap, that’s not a hard sell,” one ex-employee told me. “And the syndicates know exactly who to target.”
This is not unique to Safaricom. Insider fraud plagues banks, government institutions, and fintech startups across Africa. The difference is visibility. When you dominate 67 percent of your country’s mobile market, every scandal has national consequences.
Safaricom’s dominance means its weaknesses has become systemic. If its systems are breached, the ripple effects touch every corner of the economy, from small traders to public payrolls.
Why can’t Kenya stop this?
The problem isn’t just Safaricom. It’s structural.
Kenya’s Cybercrimes Act is robust on paper but weak in enforcement. Fraudsters are rarely prosecuted, and when employees are caught, they’re fired — not necessarily blacklisted from the industry.
That means the same individuals can walk into another telecom, fintech, or mobile agency and start over. Firing 100 people looks decisive but if none of them face legal consequences, the cycle just resets.
Meanwhile, public education campaigns like “Don’t share your PIN,” “Beware of fake calls”, often miss the deeper point. Most victims are not careless; they’re outsmarted by networks of insiders who understand Safaricom’s systems better than anyone else.
And that’s the uncomfortable truth: Kenya’s mobile money revolution is both its greatest innovation and its greatest vulnerability.
The cost of broken trust
To its credit, Safaricom is trying. It has invested heavily in automated fraud detection, staff rotation, and external whistle-blowing hotlines. It collaborates with the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and the Central Bank of Kenya to track fraud syndicates.
But each new case erodes public trust a little more. Solomon Muiu (not his real name), confided to me that he lost Ksh187,000 from his Mpesa agent float mobile account but Safaricom is yet to do anything to recover the money despite him traveling all the way from Makueni to the company’s headquaters in Westlands to report the case. On social media, M-Pesa users regularly post stories of stolen funds and unresolved complaints.
For most Kenyans, M-Pesa is not optional. It’s survival. It’s the digital wallet that buys groceries, pays school fees, and saves for emergencies. When it fails, it’s not just about money — it’s about confidence in the system.
Safaricom has often been called a national utility, as vital as electricity or water. But even utilities must confront their internal leaks.
Lessons from the inside
So, why every other year?
Because innovation and vulnerability have grown side by side. Every time Safaricom launches a new feature — M-Pesa Global, Fuliza, or 5G-enabled payments — new loopholes appear before the company can seal them.
Because Kenya’s appetite for convenience often outruns its appetite for caution.
Because, despite billions in revenue, ethical culture doesn’t scale as fast as technology does.
Safaricom built modern Kenya’s digital confidence. Now it has to rebuild its internal confidence, the kind you can’t code or automate.
A company at a crossroads
Here’s the irony: Safaricom’s success made Kenya the global model for mobile money. But that same success has turned it into a playground for digital fraud.
The company’s new fraud-prevention systems are promising, but technology can’t replace human integrity. If Kenya’s most trusted company cannot keep its own employees from undermining customer trust, what does that say about the rest of our digital infrastructure?
Perhaps the question is not how Safaricom keeps losing good people — but how it keeps hiring the wrong ones.
Because every new report, every fresh wave of dismissals, carries a silent confession: the system still leaks.
And until Safaricom finds a way to fix its human firewall — not just its software — the company will keep cycling through the same headlines, every other year, like clockwork.