Aldai MP Marianne Kitany.
There is a species of law that Kenyans have learnt to read backwards. You start at the last clause, because that is where the government hides what it actually wants, and work your way up to the preamble, where the sweet language lives.
The Kenya Information and Communication (Amendment) Bill, 2025, rewards that method of reading rather generously, for it is indeed a Trojan Horse of a solution seeking a non-existent problem.
On the face of it, this is a small, dull, technical Bill. It tells your internet service provider to install something called a billing meter, give it a unique number, monitor how much data you are using and hand you an invoice. It asks that provider to verify who you are. Once a year, it must send all of this – meter numbers, billing-system information, the works – to the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA). The memorandum accompanying the Bill says this is about protecting the consumer from exploitation, and protecting your economic interests under Article 46 of the Constitution. This is kind of Marianne Jebet Kitany, MP for Aldai in Nandi County, who tabled it.
Except that nowhere in the operative text does the Bill fix a price, cap a tariff, mandate a subsidy or so much as wave at a formula that would make your data bundle cheaper. It measures your thirst with great precision but does nothing about the cost of water.
So the question which, as Njuri Ncheke elders, we are obliged to ask, and which I now put to Parliament with all humility, is this: if the Bill does not make data cheaper, and does not by itself protect anyone from anything the courts and the Consumer Protection Act do not already cover, what, in the name of roast goat heads, is it for? A law that gives the regulator your usage patterns and strips away your anonymity, is not primarily a consumer law. It is an instrument of surveillance wearing a consumer-protection T-shirt.
Kenya has done serious work to get more of its people online, affordably, and it would be a shame to watch that work undermined by a Trojan Horse Bill smuggled in through the back door of “accountability”. The Digital Economy Blueprint set out, years ago, the idea that affordable, accessible, reliable connectivity is the foundation of the whole digital economy – not a side benefit, the foundation. The National Broadband Strategy 2025-2030 turned that idea into numbers with teeth: cut the cost of fixed broadband from 13.4 per cent of a household’s income to two per cent, push an entry-level smartphone down to Sh5,000, wire 100,000 kilometres of fibre, put Wi-Fi in 25,000 public spots and connect every school and clinic. Whatever else you think of the state’s competence in delivering targets, that is a government at least writing down, on paper, that affordability is a policy outcome to be measured.
And there has been real payoff. Kenya now counts 58.5 million data subscriptions, up more than a quarter in a single year. The ICT sector produced more than Sh701 billion of output. M-Pesa, the genuine Kenyan miracle, the one the rest of the world actually studies, now carries more than 42 million subscriptions. Researchers using night-light satellite data found that access to an M-Pesa agent lifted local economic activity by a lot, nudged more households, especially those headed by women, out of poverty, and changed what people did for a living. Nearly all Kenyans– 98 per cent – have a SIM card. Eighty-four per cent say digital services have made their lives better.
But, and here we will resist the temptation to cheer the scoreboard. The same record shows a country where coverage has sprinted far ahead of use. Ninety-eight per cent of Kenyans sit under a 4G signal; more than 65 per cent still are not on mobile internet. Women use mobile internet at 64 per cent against 75 per cent for men, and that gap only widens in rural areas. Nearly a quarter of users are stuck with only basic services, unable to afford a connection or a device, needing someone else’s help to navigate eCitizen or find a Huduma Centre. These are the benefits worth protecting: the competition among operators that keeps prices from running wild, the universal service money meant for the places the market ignores, the mobile-money rails that turned a phone into a bank, and the open, low-friction internet that let a boda boda, a mama mboga and a Form Four leaver find some use for a smartphone without first proving to the state who they are and what they were doing with it.
That is why this Bill deserves nothing but suspicion. The International Commission of Jurists has already warned that consumption-based billing, poorly implemented, can both raise the cost of access for the poor and create a monitoring apparatus ripe for misuse. We have enough laws that facilitate state snooping on us. We don’t need more.
If lawmakers want to pass a genuine consumer Bill, let it have a price safeguard, a dataminimisation clause, strict limits on what CA may do with data usage records, and an independent complaints mechanism with teeth. Otherwise, stop trying to be too clever all of a sudden.
Follow ourWhatsApp channel for breaking news updates and more stories like this.
Mr Mathiu is a communications consultant and farmer. He can be reached at [email protected].
