President William Samoei Ruto, CGH
H.E. The President of the Republic of Kenya
State House, Nairobi
Subject: A request to pause the proposed sale of the Government’s 15% stake in Safaricom—until Kenyans can see the full value, the full terms, and the full national-interest case
Your Excellency,
Let me begin with a small, ordinary Kenyan scene because the biggest policy errors often happen when leaders stop seeing the ordinary.
A young woman sells fruit by the roadside. A boda rider buys lunch. A sacco member tops up savings. A school sends fee reminders. A physician asks for a deposit before treatment. A farmer sells two bags of produce and immediately splits the money: rent, food, diesel, and a little dignity set aside for tomorrow. Most of these transactions don’t touch a bank branch. Many don’t touch a bank account. Yet they do touch something: a set of digital rails that Kenyans trust because it works, because it is everywhere, because it is fast, and because it has become quietly, completely part of the country’s economic muscle memory.
That is the context in which this proposed sale sits. Not in the language of “15%” and “market price,” but in the lived reality that a large portion of Kenya’s daily commerce now flows through a single private ecosystem. We can call it innovation, we can call it convenience, we can call it financial inclusion. All true. But it is also infrastructure, like roads you cannot see and bridges you only notice when they collapse.
That is why I am writing, respectfully but firmly, to ask you to intervene and pause the proposed sale of the Government of Kenya’s 15% stake in Safaricom, pending a transparent process that answers three questions in full daylight:
- Are we selling at fair value?
- Are we selling fair on terms?
- Are we selling in the long-term public interest?
Your Excellency, Kenyans are not naïve about markets. We understand that share prices fluctuate. We understand that a premium to the last traded price can be presented as “a good deal.” But we also understand something else, something every serious investor learns early, often painfully: markets provide liquidity; they do not always provide valuation.
When a government sells a strategic, concentrated stake in a company that is structurally important to the economy, the question is not what the price is on a screen today. The question is what the asset is worth when you include influence, embedded growth options, strategic positioning, and the premium that naturally arises when demand competes for scarce supply.
If Safaricom shares are trading at around KSh 34 per share, as Kenyans are observing, that does not vindicate a sale at that level. It raises the opposite question: what process was used to conclude that this is a seller’s price, and not simply the buyer’s moment? Kenyans are asking this because we have seen the pattern before. The price becomes “the market.” The market becomes “the truth.” The truth becomes whatever is most convenient in a press conference.
But the real test of value, especially in block sales, has always been competition.
If you truly believe this deal is fair, the simplest way to prove it is to open the process. Let the world bid. Let credible buyers compete. Let Kenyans see price discovery happen in front of them. A country does not lose by inviting competition. It loses by avoiding it.
Now, Your Excellency, even if we set price aside for a moment, there is a deeper worry that Kenyans can feel in their bones: the idea that we are about to sell the cow precisely when the milk is about to flow more strongly.
In the testimony circulating among citizens, there is a recurring theme: that recent investments, painful in the short term and profit-suppressing in the accounting sense, may be approaching a phase where returns become more visible. If that is true, haste becomes suspicious, not efficient. In any economy, you can forgive leaders for being optimistic. You cannot forgive them for being careless when the public is the shareholder.
But the most alarming concern, the one that turns “I disagree” into “this must stop,” is about the terms you do not see in the headline number.
Kenyans have been introduced to a concept that commercial lawyers understand well: the real economics of a transaction often live in the conditions. In your citizens’ language, it is “sweetening the deal.” In transaction language, it is the package of conditions precedent and embedded undertakings that shift value from seller to buyer without ever appearing in the headline price.
If, as alleged in public submissions, regulatory concessions such as licence discounts, extensions, or other commitments are being bundled into this sale, then the country is not raising cash. It is trading future national revenue for present political oxygen. That is a dangerous bargain even when done transparently. Done opaquely, it becomes something else entirely: a quiet transfer of value from citizens to counterparties, justified after the fact as “standard practice.”
And please allow me to say this plainly, as a Kenyan speaking to the Head of State.
If Kenyans come to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Government’s asset is being sold “for a song,” while the buyer is praised elsewhere for having struck “a great deal,” then the cost is not only financial. It is institutional. It is a wound in public trust. And trust, once cut, bleeds into everything: tax compliance, investment credibility, social stability, and the legitimacy of reforms you may desperately need the public to accept.
This is why a pause is prudent statecraft.
A pause would allow your administration to do the following without drama, without grandstanding, and without turning the issue into tribal or partisan theatre:
- Make public the valuation basis, not merely the market price. Show Kenyans who valued the stake, when they were hired, what methods they used, and what sensitivity tests they ran.
- Make public the complete schedule of transaction-linked commitments, especially any regulatory undertakings tied to licences, durations, discounts, rates, or other concessions. Kenyans deserve to see net proceeds, not headline proceeds.
- Prove that information asymmetry has been managed. If the buyer is already inside the asset with privileged access, then the burden on the seller, especially a sovereign seller, is to demonstrate procedural fairness through open competition and independent verification.
- Demonstrate that the decision is not a short-term fiscal patch that becomes a long-term strategic regret. If the rationale is debt pressure, then show the whole calculus: how future dividends compare to present cash, and whether alternative financing options were exhausted before selling a stake in a company that has become part of the economy’s operating system.
Your Excellency, I am aware that any government faces an unforgiving arithmetic: roads, hospitals, schools, water, jobs, debt service. The budget is a stubborn creature. But there are moments when the arithmetic must include more than today’s deficit. It must include the price of tomorrow’s bargaining power.
Safaricom, by virtue of its footprint and the centrality of digital payments, has become a strategic economic actor. This is no longer 1999. This is no longer 2008. Kenya’s economy today is more digitised, more platform-dependent, and more networked, and therefore more vulnerable to concentrated points of failure or concentrated points of leverage.
The question you must answer, as the custodian of the Republic, is not merely whether we can raise money by selling. It is what we lose quietly and permanently when we reduce the state’s voice in the rails of daily life.
To the Vodacom leadership copied here, I say this with equal candour and respect. A fair and open process is not an enemy of capital. It is the capital’s best friend. If you believe you are paying a fair price for a strategic stake, you should welcome competition and transparent terms because legitimacy protects shareholder value far better than secrecy ever will.
Your Excellency, history has a way of turning technical transactions into moral verdicts. Often not because leaders intended wrongdoing, but because they underestimated the symbolism of selling the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong way.
Please intervene.
Pause the sale. Demand an independent valuation and full disclosure of all embedded concessions. Direct that any divestment, if it must happen, proceed through a competitive and internationally credible process. And above all, treat this transaction for what it is: not a routine trade, but a decision about the architecture of Kenya’s economic sovereignty.
Respectfully,
Duncun Motanya.
𝑭𝑰𝑵𝑻𝑨𝑲 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒊𝒓𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏.