The Phone Numbers Worth KSh 2 billion

Good evening. It’s Brian from The Kenyan Wall Street.

As we head into the weekend, these are our top financial stories today…

The Phone Numbers Worth KSh 2 billion

By Fred Obura

For years, 48 Safaricom numbers did the invisible work of a Kenyan travel company, connecting customers to Bonfire Adventures for bookings, payments, WhatsApp enquiries, and everything in between, until the founders fell out and one of them noticed that the SIM cards were registered in his personal name. Simon Kabu now wants KSh1.868 billion in historical licence fees for the commercial use of numbers he says have always been his, plus a monthly fee going forward if Bonfire wishes to keep using them. The High Court declined to order Safaricom to preserve the numbers for Bonfire, finding that the company had no registered contractual relationship with Safaricom over those lines at all, since every one of them was in Kabu's name rather than the company's. Kabu says he has no interest in the company's databases or client lists and simply wants to be paid, but Bonfire's position is that the numbers and everything built around them are effectively inseparable at this point. 

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Trimming the gov’t’s cyberspace powers

By Brian Nzomo

The High Court has struck down the provision that allowed a government committee to order internet providers to block websites and applications without first obtaining a judge's approval, removing what Justice Patricia Nyaundi described as a broad censorship power that invited arbitrary enforcement and forced ordinary people to self-censor simply out of fear. The committee in question is made up largely of government and security agencies and could have operated entirely outside judicial oversight. The court also struck down a separate offence that criminalized speech likely to cause another person to die by suicide, finding the language too imprecise to justify penalties as severe as ten years in prison. The wider cybercrime law survives, having withstood broader attempts to overturn it entirely, but the ruling draws a clear line between legislation designed to fight online fraud and legislation that gives the state the power to shut down the internet when it finds the conversation inconvenient.

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Water sector losses reach 48%

By Fred Obura

Nearly half of all the water Kenya treats and pumps into its distribution network never reaches a paying customer, lost to leaking pipes, illegal connections, faulty meters, and billing failures before a single shilling changes hands. The scale of that number, 48%, means utilities are financing the production of water that generates no return, a structural drain on revenue that makes it harder to maintain ageing infrastructure, expand access, or keep tariffs at levels ordinary households can afford. The good news, as experts at a three-day government conference this week have pointed out, is that fixing this does not require building new water sources or raising prices, it requires deploying technology that already exists including smart meters, satellite leak detection, and real-time monitoring systems that can find and seal the losses before they compound. Whether utilities can finance that transition is the harder question, and the conference's answer involves public-private partnerships, blended finance, and green bonds. 

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