CA Board Secretary Mercy Wanjau replaces Wangusi at the helm

By Monica Muema

The Communications Authority (CA) has appointed Mercy Wanjau as interim Director-General to replace Francis Wangusi who is ending his second and final term in office today.

Mercy Wanjau is board secretary and is the head legal officer for the authority, a commercial lawyer with 16 years of legal, policy and regulatory experience in the ICT sector. She holds LLB (Hons.) and LLM ( Corporate law and taxation) degrees and have board experience having served as a non executive director and a university council member.

Her forte and area of focus is on regulatory professional and describes herself as a “self motivated leader who is deeply interested in harnessing the transformative power of responsive public policy, regulatory reform and innovative technologies towards achieving development with impact,”.

In her previous role as an Assistant Director,Regulatory Affairs and Governance at the Communications Authority of Kenya, the ICT sector regulator, her main duties mainly entailed providing advisory support in legal and regulatory aspects, public policy analysis and legislative development.

She has also engaged extensively in negotiations, stakeholder consultations and implementation of the ICT frameworks locally, in the region e.g. Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC) and internationally e.g. United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Bank and Infodev.

“I am an Eisenhower Fellow and a published author with the ITU and UNCTAD,” reads her Linked account.

Communications Authority of Kenya Chairman Ngene Gituku said Mercy Wanjau will coordinate the duties relating to the Director General’s office in acting capacity pending the appointment of a Director General.

CA is a crucial and strategic Parastatal charged with the job of regulating the ICT industry, licensing and regulating telecommunications, Postal and Courier as well as Broadcasting Services.

The Authority is also responsible for managing the country’s Frequency Spectrum and Numbering Resources and facilitating the development of e-commerce.

Wangusi’s exit has been as acrimonious as his tenure, as the authority’s second director-general and highlighted the perennial leadership wrangles that have dogged the regulator since inception.

He assumed office in 2012 after the High Court nullified the re-appointment of his predecessor, Charles Njoroge, by then ICT minister Samuel Poghisio.

The previous board had been dissolved following allegations of corruption in its decision to award the third mobile subscriber license to Econet Wireless, which later became Essar Communications, operators of the Yu network after a 2009 acquisition.

Five years later, when Safaricom and Airtel Kenya signed an agreement to acquire YuMobile for Sh10 billion, the CA top management once again stood accused of abusing their mandate and causing the taxpayer losses by waiving billions of shillings in license fees.