Who Owns Safaricom?

Buy vegetables. Pay an electricity bill. Send money to a relative. Pay school fees. Receive money from a customer. Buy airtime. For millions of Kenyans, many of these ordinary acts run through the same corporate ecosystem: Safaricom.

That is why today’s High Court judgment is much larger than a dispute over a telecommunications share sale. The court nullified the Government of Kenya’s sale of a 15 percent Safaricom stake to South Africa’s Vodacom Group and ordered the shares restored to the state. The government says it will appeal.

The legal dispute turns on transparency, public participation, valuation, national security and the nature of the transaction itself. But behind those questions lies another one: what happens when a listed private company becomes so embedded in daily life that its ownership begins to resemble a question about public infrastructure?

Safaricom is not the state. M-Pesa is not a public utility in the conventional legal sense. Yet the scale of their role means that a change in corporate control can carry consequences far beyond shareholders.

A 15 percent sale that changed control

The government entered the transaction owning 35 percent of Safaricom. It sold 15 percent for KSh204.3 billion, at KSh34 per share, leaving the state with 20 percent. Public investors continued to hold 25 percent.

The crucial change was on the other side of the ledger. Vodacom’s effective interest rose to 55 percent after the transaction and related ownership restructuring, giving it majority control. That distinction became central to the High Court’s judgment.

A three-judge bench concluded that the transaction had been presented publicly as a partial divestiture while its actual effect amounted to a takeover. The judges found that material information about the buyer, structure and consequences of the transaction had not been adequately disclosed to the public, Parliament or Cabinet.

The court therefore quashed the approvals and ordered the 15 percent stake returned to the Government of Kenya on behalf of the public. The government has announced an appeal; its initial attempt to have the judgment suspended was rejected, although the parties may make a substantive application for a stay.

This means today’s ruling is consequential, but it is not necessarily the final word. The ownership structure may still be contested through the appellate courts.

This is not only a phone company

M-Pesa is Safaricom’s mobile-money platform and one of the clearest reasons the ownership dispute matters outside financial markets. It allows customers to send and receive money, pay merchants and bills, access financial products and connect to a large ecosystem of businesses and public services.

The Communications Authority of Kenya describes M-Pesa as a large ecosystem that is essential to most Kenyans. In its competition study, the regulator reported that M-Pesa held 90.9 percent of the mobile-money market in the fourth quarter of 2025. That degree of market concentration creates powerful network effects: people use a payment system partly because the people and businesses around them use it too.

Safaricom’s own reporting shows how far the platform has moved beyond person-to-person transfers. M-Pesa connects to government social-protection programmes, bank partnerships, merchants, developers and tens of thousands of third-party integrations through application programming interfaces — software connections that allow different digital systems to communicate.

This is why describing Safaricom as “Kenya’s Vodafone” would mislead a European reader. For many households and businesses, Safaricom is simultaneously a communications provider, a payment network and an access point to financial and digital services.

The company remains a commercial enterprise. But commercial ownership now sits on top of infrastructure with an unusually public character.

The court’s argument was about process as well as ownership

The High Court relied in part on Articles 10 and 118 of Kenya’s Constitution. Article 10 establishes national values and principles of governance, including participation, integrity, transparency and accountability. Article 118 requires Parliament to facilitate public participation in its legislative and other business.

Parliament had conducted hearings in 30 counties. The judges nevertheless concluded that participation could not be meaningful when crucial transaction documents — including the share-purchase and dividend-rights agreements — had not been made available to those being consulted.

That is an important constitutional distinction. Public participation is not measured simply by the number of meetings held. Citizens need enough material information to understand what they are being asked to comment on.

The judgment therefore turns an apparently technical privatisation dispute into a broader democratic principle: the larger the public consequence of an asset sale, the less adequate consultation becomes if the underlying transaction remains opaque.

Why sell a valuable public asset?

The government’s economic case is straightforward. Selling part of its Safaricom holding converted an asset into immediate capital that could be directed toward infrastructure and other investment priorities. The KSh204.3 billion purchase price also represented a premium over the market price when the transaction was announced.

There was another component. The state received KSh40.2 billion upfront in exchange for rights connected to future dividends from its remaining 20 percent holding. In effect, part of a future income stream was converted into money available today.

The High Court was sceptical of that logic. It argued that exchanging a continuing public income stream for a one-off payment could deprive future generations of the benefits of an asset held on their behalf.

This is not an argument that governments should never sell assets. It is the classic public-finance tension between present capital and future income. A government under fiscal pressure may value cash today; a long-term shareholder may value decades of dividends. The constitutional question is who gets to make that trade-off, with what information and through what process.

When corporate infrastructure becomes strategic infrastructure

The most striking part of the judgment concerns national security. The court pointed to Safaricom’s role in mobile money, government payment platforms, communications, personal data and infrastructure associated with election-result transmission.

The judges did not conclude that Vodacom had interfered with Kenya’s elections or government systems. Nor is foreign ownership itself evidence of such interference. Their concern was prospective: transferring effective control of infrastructure this sensitive without a prior national-security assessment could create risks that ordinary sector regulation does not fully answer.

That argument deserves careful treatment because it can easily slide into economic nationalism. Kenya depends on foreign investment, and multinational ownership is normal in telecommunications around the world. Vodacom is itself a major African operator and has been an investor in Safaricom for years.

The harder question is therefore not whether foreign ownership is inherently dangerous. It is whether some corporate systems become sufficiently central to money, communications, identity and democratic administration that changes in control require safeguards beyond those applied to an ordinary listed company.

Who owned what?

Before the disputed sale, the Kenyan government held 35 percent of Safaricom. The transaction reduced that stake to 20 percent. Vodacom’s effective interest rose to 55 percent, while public shareholders held the remaining 25 percent.

The High Court has now ordered the 15 percent block restored to the government. If that order takes effect without being stayed or overturned on appeal, the state’s holding would return to 35 percent and the majority-control structure created by the sale would be unwound.

The legal process therefore matters enormously. “The court reversed the sale” describes today’s judgment. It should not be read as a guarantee that this will be Safaricom’s final ownership structure after appeals are exhausted.

AFRICA3000’s assessment is that the Safaricom dispute exposes a category problem.

Kenya has a company that is plainly commercial, listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange and expected to compete, invest and make profits. At the same time, parts of its network have become embedded in the country’s social and economic operating system.

M-Pesa makes that contradiction easiest to see. A payment platform can begin as a product and gradually become something closer to infrastructure because households, merchants, banks, government programmes and other businesses build their own behaviour around it.

Once that happens, ownership questions acquire a public dimension even when the asset remains privately operated.

The High Court has answered one legal version of that question by insisting that a transfer of effective control required transparency, meaningful participation and greater attention to strategic risk. The appeal courts may agree, modify that reasoning or overturn it.

But the underlying policy question will remain whatever happens to this particular transaction: when millions of citizens depend on a private network to participate in everyday economic life, how should the state protect the public interest without turning successful private infrastructure into a political instrument?

Europe has its own versions of this debate: telecommunications networks, cloud computing, payment systems, semiconductor production, energy grids and social platforms increasingly sit somewhere between private enterprise and strategic infrastructure.

Kenya offers an unusually vivid case because mobile money became mainstream there earlier and more deeply than in most European economies. M-Pesa demonstrates how quickly a commercial innovation can become part of the architecture of ordinary life.

The Safaricom judgment also illustrates a wider democratic problem around privatisation. Governments may have legitimate reasons to monetise public assets. Investors may have legitimate reasons to acquire them. But citizens cannot meaningfully assess a transaction if its real consequences for control, future income and strategic infrastructure are not clear.

That makes today’s dispute about more than Safaricom. It is about the rules democracies need when yesterday’s successful company becomes tomorrow’s essential infrastructure.

The appeal: The government has said it will challenge the High Court ruling. The immediate question is whether a stay is granted and how the appellate courts treat the finding that the deal amounted to a takeover.

The money: Reversing a completed KSh204.3 billion transaction is not merely an entry in a share register. Watch how repayment, dividends and transaction costs are handled if the judgment takes effect.

Safaricom governance: Majority control affects governance as well as ownership percentages. Watch what happens to board and executive nomination arrangements created after Vodacom reached 55 percent.

National-security rules: The judgment may encourage Kenya to develop clearer rules for ownership changes involving telecommunications, data, payment systems and other strategic digital infrastructure.

M-Pesa competition: The broader policy issue remains market concentration. Interoperability and competition reforms will matter regardless of who owns Safaricom shares.