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.

I agree the whole deal is fishy, I think the money could have been spent in other areas of security;
lakini if you look at the city of leicester one will notice a big infrastructure difference with the city of Nairobi, plus it does not matter where you source the technology one government or the other will have access to the same, its a matter of the east or the west having access.

Did someone make a findeo of the preso promoting this thing?

I mean seriously how inept is this gov't. What have they done right?

Sorry, they have done one thing right....Huduma centres are great.

But other than that, its been one bungling error after another. This reminds me exactly of Bush era. Mistake after mistake after mistake. Yet the right wing could never let him go. In the end, the economy crumbled to its knees.

Uhuru is walking the same and exact path as Bush. Look at how quickly Americans forgot him.

This is not a contract to sign especially with public funds. It just is soooooo wrong in too many levels. Just so wrong.

Yeah, even Anglofleecing was a security issue and some details can't be given to the public .

Care to tell us about the cost of CISCO videoconference which is also part of the system