Court Orders ‘Please Call Me’ Creator to Be Paid ksh1.4 Billion

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A South African court has offered a ruling that will see telecommunication giant Vodacom, which owns a 35 percent stake in Safaricom Plc, pay the inventor of ‘Please Call Me’ 20 percent of the total revenue collected through the product for the past twenty years.

Gauteng High Court delivered the ruling after finding out that Nkosana Makate, the product creator, was bilked by Vodacom.

Nkosana invented the product, which is currently in use in 32 countries, including Kenya. It allows users to send a short message to other users when they have insufficient airtime balance by just dialing a code, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), for free.

Vodacom had initially paid Nkosana money amounting to Sh345 million, but the court said that this was too little in comparison to the profits that the service has attracted to the company.

“Vodacom CEO was disingenuous to project that Product Cost Management (PCM), as a third-party service provider, should only be allocated a duration of five years,” the judge said.

Judge Wendy Hughes further ordered the recalculation and gave guidelines to ensure that the true worth of the service is known for Nkosana to be compensated accordingly.

She instructed Vodacom to pay Nkosana five percent of the money generated by the PCM product from March 2001 to March 2021. Initially, Vodacom had calculated for five years and paid Nkosana.

Following this edict, Nkosana will get R188 million, which translates to about Ksh1.4 billion. This is however a lower figure as he was fighting for 15 percent of the total earnings. This could have been R10 billion (Sh75 billion) since Vodacom has generated over R66 billion (Ksh500 B) since 2001.

Nkosana is a former employee at Vodacom.

The post Court Orders ‘Please Call Me’ Creator to Be Paid ksh1.4 Billion appeared first on LitKenya.

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