Imagine M-Pesa Going Down For 48 Hours

Juma

4 years ago

There was a global outage for Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The whole world caught a cold. Everyone was visibly scared. The platforms collapsed for about 6 hours. When they finally came back online, an impact had already been felt.

For just 6 hours, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dropped by 7 billion US dollars. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zuckerberg went down 5 percent to 120.9 billion US dollars.

The dip added to a drop of about 15 percent since mid-September sending his worth dropping by nearly 20 billion dollars from a high of 140 billion.

The last time Facebook suffered such a blackout was in 2019 when the network shut down for 14 hours. Earlier in 2018, it also went dark for a whole day.

Now, let us bring this closer home. Imagine M-Pesa having an outage for 48 hours where people cannot access their money, cannot transact, etc., etc., what will happen? How will the economy react? How much money will be lost in terms of revenue?

The truth is, other countries have banks, but Kenya has M-Pesa. We may have other players in the mobile money sector but none beats Safaricom’s M-Pesa. The platform handles so much money that we should really protect it by all means.

Currently, 85 percent of bank transactions in Kenya are now being conducted via mobile phones according to new data from the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). And M-Pesa accounts for almost 90 percent of all the transactions.

This means that for every 10 Kenyans transacting with their bank, eight persons are doing so from their handheld devices. People are no longer visiting the banking halls unless it is really necessary.

For instance, between January and June this year, KCB recorded 181 million mobile transactions valued at 1.1 trillion shillings and booked revenues of 3.2 billion shillings from the channel.

M-Pesa is now valued at around 2.2 trillion shillings. This is almost the annual budget of Kenya. This is not something we can take lightly. With cybercrime now being the highest around the world, there is a need for all agencies to protect the entity.