A Safaricom customer triggered an online row after saying the telco deducted more from her M-Pesa account than she expected when she bought bundles for another line. Her complaint accused the company of taking money without clear consent because the recipient had an unpaid Okoa Jahazi balance.
The allegation spread on social media and drew mixed reactions. Some users said Safaricom was abusing its market position, while others argued the complaint misunderstood how the service works.
To verify the process, the report carried out two tests in 2018. In the first, airtime was sent to a number with an outstanding Okoa Jahazi debt, and no extra amount was charged beyond the airtime transferred. The airtime was used to reduce the debt.
In the second test, a data bundle was being purchased for a line that still owed Okoa Jahazi. Before the transaction could proceed, a prompt informed the buyer that the recipient had an outstanding balance and that the same amount would also be deducted from the buyer’s account if the purchase continued.
The prompt gave the buyer a choice to proceed or cancel. Safaricom said the same thing in its response on Facebook, stating that customers are notified during the purchase flow and are only charged for the debt if they agree to continue.
“On the prompts that you receive in the process of buying the bundles, you are usually notified that the recipient has an Okoa jahazi of a certain amount and advises you that you will be deducted the same. It gives you an option to either go ahead with the purchase and be deducted the whole amount or to cancel. You will only be deducted the amount if you agree to go ahead with the purchase…”
The service had been active for five years at the time of the report. Safaricom had introduced it to simplify the sambaza data process for customers whose lines could not access other services until an Okoa Jahazi debt was cleared.
That meant a person trying to send data to such a line had to either settle the debt first or accept that the debt would be cleared as part of the same transaction. The report found that the option was not hidden; it appeared in the payment process before the buyer confirmed the purchase.
