Rank: Veteran Joined: 4/27/2010 Posts: 951 Location: Nyumbani
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Ceinz wrote:Kshs. 15 B Surveilance Contract.
Reading Tuesday's star article by Timothy Kiberia: Magic Bullet:Is Safaricom Cover for China's Huawei?
Picked out the following;
Kshs. 15 B for 1,800 cameras translates to approx. Kshs. 8,333,333 or $ 95,000 per camera.
Instant online quotation from Cisco, The World's number one supplier and installer of CCTV surveillance cameras and networks reveals a significantly lower cost.
The cost of the equipment and installation of the network in areas that already have their own fibre optic cables averages btwn. $ 5,000 and $8,000 per camera.
To illustrate this further, one needs to look at the City of Leicester in the Uk, which recently installed 2,083 cameras at a cost of £ 14 million or Kshs. 2.1 billion. Leicester got almost 300 more cameras and spent seven times less than what Kenya intends to spend.
Not forgetting that in August 2010, Safaricom selected Hauwei a its vendor of choice for the supply of its core network requirements and roll out of the 4G Network.
Huawei, like all other leading Chinese telecommunication companies, is linked directly to the Chinese military. In essence the 'Safaricom' contract means we are outsourcing our surveillance and intelligence to the Chinese government.
President UK describes this project as the magic bullet. Unfortunately there is no magic bullet here; Hauwei/ Chinese network equipment comes with the Magic Kill Packet that allows back-door penetration by the supplier- in this case the Chinese military. This in simple language exposes our critical national security infrastructure to the Chinese military.
It is this connection with the Chinese military and easily attack-able network that led to Hauwei being barred from the North American, Australian and most of Western Europe Market. This is funny if not serious. To say we are exposing our security, what make are the jets being used by the Airforce, the helicopters by the army and those ships bought by "murungarus" for the navy + all the communication systems . What is the make of the phone being used at state house, the computers being used by the NSIS guys , the email systems aka outlook, thunderbird and lotus. All these are not Kenyan /local and are prone to hacking interception and all . I think this point should not be used to judge the contract.
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