Cyprian Nyakundi, a blogger, has been writing several defamatory articles about Safaricom on his website cnyakundi.com and the telecommunications company has today released an ad on the Daily Nation Page 51, which is a court order that summons the blogger to court. These are the screenshots of the court order:
From the court order, an injunction has been granted prohibiting the blogger from further publishing other defamatory articles about Safaricom & a mandatory injunction to pull down from his blog articles that are defamatory to Safaricom.
The suit highlighted several issues:
- Cyprian Nyakundi had published a series of defamatory articles, a fifteen part exposure on Safaricom’s operations
- In the first article of the series in his blog, “How Safaricom steals from Kenyans with third parties” the blogger had portrayed Safaricom as a fraud & a thief by claiming they are obtaining money and profits in form of airtime from its subscribers through non-existent subscriptions
- In the next article of the series named “Your privacy and Safaricom are two different worlds”, the blogpost defamed Safaricom claiming that the company is infringing on its customer’s privacy
- In the third article of the expose, “Time to put Safaricom back in its box before it seriously hurts Kenyans”, Nyakundi discussed the plight of Safaricom employees who were allegedly laid off as a result of falling ill and that in fact the contents in paragraph five relate to an ongoing civil suit in court (explicitly mentioned in the suit as Suit No. 241 of 2013- Josephine Wanjiru Boro vs Safaricom Limited)
- In the fourth article of the series expose “Are Safaricom lone wolves preying on our security What they don’t want you to know”, Nyakundi was accusing Safaricom on breaching the security of Kenyans
- Nyakundi apparently failed to apologize & to withdraw the defamatory statements and this action continues to damage Safaricom’s reputation
- There is a highly likelihood that Nyakundi will continue to publish these defamatory articles that will affect Safaricom’s popularity and customer base
- The allegations Nyakundi had published against Safaricom were unsubstantiated and baseless
Safaricom had sued another blogger, Alai, for libel due an article he wrote which seems to be the basis for Nyakundi’s 3rd article in his series. Apparently, he was released on a bond of 200,000 according to a Daily Nation article
This incident shows the increasing need to have bloggers and internet users realize that they are not immune from the law even as they hide behind their keyboards to slander individuals and corporate entities. Nyakundi faces a civil suit and this probably came as a surprise to him as indicated on his Twitter timeline.
Safaricom is suing me . Oh my God pic.twitter.com/44CJq6o5Jy
— Cyprian, Is Nyakundi (@C_NyaKundiH) June 24, 2015
Here is the full suit document as it appears on the newspaper (PDF).
