Ring them bells: couple celebrate ordeal’s end

Vodacom loomed large as a foe but for 15 years Please Call Me inventor and wife fought on

LITIGATION FINANCE: Nkosana Makate wants to fight exploitation NKOSANA Makate’s wife, Rebecca, often thought about begging her husband to drop his expensive court case against Vodacom, which for 15 years had refused to pay him for his Please Call Me idea.

But on Tuesday, when the Constitutional Court handed victory to Makate, she had nothing but admiration for his persistence.

Speaking for the first time since the matter appeared in the High Court in Pretoria in 2013, Rebecca Makate, 37, said: “It was worth waiting for.

“I did not really ask him [to give up] but it is something that has gone through my mind. Before we got sponsors it was at our cost and it really was too much for us. Even with the sponsors there were a couple of times when I thought, ‘This is impossible’. You know when you think things are not meant for certain races and against such a big company? It seemed impossible.”

Her husband is proceeding with plans to publish a book on his 15-year experience of trying to get compensation from Vodacom, to be on sale “before December”, through a UKbased publisher.

Makate, 39, who bowed his head momentarily in relief as Constitutional Court Justice Chris Jafta delivered the ruling, said: “We had no option but to proceed. It was either that or then Vodacom comes . . . and takes everything that I had. That would have meant they have won and they must take me out and clean me out and make sure I never raise my head again.”

This was in reference to the costs Vodacom would have claimed if he had decided to cut his losses after both the high court and Supreme Court of Appeal ruled against him.

But on Tuesday, the Constitutional Court ruled that the mobile network operator has to begin negotiations with Makate within 30 days over compensation.

Neither Vodacom nor its parent company, the UK-based Vodafone, would comment on the judgment as they were “studying its contents”.

Actuaries commissioned by Makate’s legal team had previously estimated that the company had realised about R70-billion in turnover from its implementation of the Please Call Me service in 2001.

In 2000, Makate, employed at Vodacom as a junior accountant, shared with the company his idea that customers without airtime could send a free SMS to another user to request a call-back. In a verbal agreement, the head of product development, Philip Geissler, promised to negotiate with Vodacom for compensation for Makate.

This never materialised, even after Vodacom commercialised the idea. Several years later, former CEO Alan Knott-Craig claimed in his autobiography to have invented Please Call Me.

In the previous court case the company maintained that Geissler did not have the authority to enter into such agreements on behalf of Vodacom and that Makate’s claim had lapsed because he brought the matter to court more than three years after he raised it with the company.

These were two key points in the case and the attorney representing Makate, who declined to be named, said the Constitutional Court ruling would set a precedent in law for how these matters were argued in future.

Makate, now a financial director at the South African Local Government Association, said the starting point for negotiations would be his original request for 15% of every rand generated by Please Call Me for Vodacom. He said actuaries had found Vodacom processed about 1.2 billion Please Call Me messages annually.

He had not yet made plans to spend any award, but would consider providing litigation finance for other inventors who had been exploited.

“I think what the country needs is credible litigation finance that can assist genuine cases. Exploitation is forever present and it will always rear its head. For that to be managed, a proper, credible litigation finance process would need to be developed.”

Makate had assistance from global firm Sterling Rand for a legal bill that ran up to about R8-million, in exchange for a cut of his proceeds from Vodacom. The parties have since parted ways.

Stirling Rand director Errol Elsdon declined to comment on the percentage his company would receive, saying: “That’s confidential for now.”

You think things are not meant for certain races and against such a big company . . .

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