I warned the engineers that attended Safaricom’s recently launched the Safaricom Engineering Summit.
I said, they’ll come to the media crying later about their stolen intellectual property, patents, and utility models.
Safaricom is no respecter of laws, intellectual property registrations or non-disclosure /non-circumvention agreements.
It will steal, wait for you in court, threaten you using rogue police officers and bribe judges, your lawyers even your friends to go quiet on you.
Safaricom Engineering Summit: A new place to steal inventions and threaten developers
Some people accuse CODEAFRIKA of not registering their proposal with the Kenya Copyright Board or the relevant authorities even Kenya Industrial Property Institute. What they don’t know is that Safaricom doesn’t respect that.
Many youth, whose intellectual property is stolen, are locked from challenging the injustice due to lack of money.
Others are lied to and paid peanuts for their inventions, worse still, they get duped and they discover when it is too late.
Below, is a Twitter thread by TrustMeBro (@MelonieLangat)
March 2022, CodeAfrika sent documents to the Safaricom Foundation to ask for funding, explaining to them how they had the big idea that will help Africa get out of poverty by commercializing talent and innovation. Months later, July 27th 2022, Safaricom launched a duplicate idea.
Let me ask you this For how much longer shall we stand capitalist businesses and companies take our ideas and use those ideas to make money while the owner of the idea sleeps on the floor of a shanty with a leaking roof, while staying all day without food?
IP Watch Article: Intellectual Property Theft By Corporations in Kenya
How long will you and I be happy with the status quo of most Africans who languish in poverty? How much longer will the African youth continue to go to school, get the degrees they were told was a key to success, only for the padlock to be changed when they joined the equation
How much longer will the rich continue to be rich while the poor, no matter their level of education continue to be poor in Africa? How much more lives will we stand to see lost due to hunger that comes as a result of poverty?
Youth, you brilliant youth, the youth in the universities and TVET’s that are used in the name of being given scholarships or unworthy jobs. You heard me right !! The capitalists give you scholarships at the expense of your ideas.
They have the financial resources to take up your idea and quickly implement it, take it to the market and use it to generate millions of dollars while you, the owner of the idea languish in poverty with all the papers you got in the name of certified individuals
There is the story of the guy who had the M-Pesa idea that Safaricom and later many giant companies in the world took up. We hear stories about how the guy has nothing to call his own.
The guy who had the idea of the “/Please Call Me” call back message is currently in court to sue Safaricom for using his idea to generate profits and leave him languish in poverty.
READ: Safaricom taken to court over copyright Infringement
What CodeAfrika would do is let the young stars thrive on their ideas. What was the plan? The plan was to incubate those ideas into hundreds or thousands of businesses that will generate income and create employment all over Africa.
The owner of the idea would be the CEO, with them owning 70% of the company shares and the remaining 30% owned by CodeAfrika to enable incubation of the next business. It is very important for all of us to understand that we are in the information age.
Information is used to generate wealth and greedy individuals and companies are using information from the youth. My advice? When you have an idea, be careful who you reveal it to because they will use it to thrive and you will remain there lamenting how education is not the key.
We are better together.
