By Ben Nyangweso | The Weekly Vision
When Justice Josephine Wayua Mong’are ordered Safaricom PLC to pay innovator Peter Nthei Muoki and his firm, Beluga Limited, Sh1.4 billion in damages, plus an indefinite 0.5 per cent cut of its gross M-PESA revenue, the ruling seemed like a single corporate embarrassment. It was not. It was the latest, and by far the costliest, entry in a pattern that plays out wherever a lone inventor with a good idea meets a corporation with the resources to build it without them.
The pattern is almost always the same. An independent innovator develops something genuinely useful. They pitch it, in good faith, to a company with the infrastructure to bring it to market. The company listens closely, asks detailed questions, and then declines, citing regulatory hurdles, technical limitations, or simply “it’s not for us.” Months or years later, a strikingly similar product appears, built in-house and credited to no one but the corporation. The inventor is left to prove, at great personal cost, that what looks like coincidence was in fact copying.
Muoki began developing his “M-Teen Mobile Wallet USSD Code” in October 2020, targeting teenagers and young adults with a parent-controlled M-PESA sub-wallet. Crucially, he registered the concept with the Kenya Copyright Board before ever approaching Safaricom, a decision that would prove decisive in court.
Between March and June 2021, he shared detailed USSD flows and system logic with senior Safaricom executives, including then Chief Operating Officer Sitoyo Lopokoiyot, who told him the idea was not implementable because teenagers lacked National Identity Cards. Seventeen months later, in November 2022, Safaricom launched “Manage Child Account,” later marketed more widely as M-PESA Go, a product the court found bore an “uncanny resemblance” to Muoki’s design.
Justice Mong’are found that Safaricom could not produce the internal records needed to substantiate its own account of independent development, including formal instructions to its technology partner, Huawei, or a final functional requirements specification. She was especially unpersuaded by Safaricom’s claim that the project stemmed from informal verbal advice from the Central Bank of Kenya Governor, noting drily that a company of Safaricom’s scale does not typically build major products on undocumented conversations.
“Safaricom did not seek a licence; they simply took it,” the judge found. She then awarded Muoki not just a one-off sum but a permanent royalty stream, a structure legal analysts say is the first of its kind in Kenyan copyright law.
Muoki’s case is not Safaricom’s first encounter with allegations of appropriating others’ creative and technical work, nor is Safaricom the only Kenyan corporate giant to face such claims. In Alternative Media Limited v Safaricom (Civil Case 263 of 2004), the High Court found Safaricom guilty of using copyrighted artwork without permission.
What distinguished the Muoki case, and explains why it has landed so heavily, is the scale of the figures involved and the novelty of the ongoing royalty. M-PESA revenue climbed from roughly Sh82 billion in the year before Muoki’s pitch to Sh182.7 billion in the financial year ended March 2026. By tying compensation to that growth rather than a fixed sum, the court has transformed a missed licensing conversation in 2021 into what could become a billion-shilling annual obligation within a few years, appeal permitting.
For Kenyan entrepreneurs and technologists, several practical lessons emerge from Muoki’s four-year fight. Formal registration matters. Muoki secured a Kenya Copyright Board certificate before approaching Safaricom, giving him prima facie evidence of ownership that proved central to his case.
Documentation is protection. The court explicitly distinguished between a general, unprotectable idea and Muoki’s detailed, documented expression of it, the specific USSD menu trees, commands and system responses, which ultimately qualified as a literary work under the Copyright Act.
Courts will draw adverse inferences. When a large corporation cannot produce internal paperwork to substantiate a claim of independent invention, judges are prepared to treat that gap as evidence. Any company’s legal and product teams should take that warning seriously when engaging with outside pitches.
For corporations, the message cuts the other way. Justice Mong’are’s own words in the judgment are instructive: the case is “a cautionary tale for innovators and corporations alike… good ideas do not only originate in boardrooms.” Any company that receives an unsolicited proposal must be able to demonstrate, through real documentation, that whatever it later builds was genuinely developed independently.
Whether or not the Court of Appeal ultimately disturbs the Sh1.4 billion figure or the royalty structure, the reputational marker has already been set. Kenya’s courts have signalled, in unusually forceful terms, that a corporate giant’s size is no shield against a well-documented claim from an individual innovator.
