The Great Kenyan Royalties Heist: Musicians Sic EACC and DCI on MCSK

The facts are in, ladies and gentlemen:

1. Three CMOs (Collective Management Organisations), the Kenya Association of Music Producers (KAMP), the Performers Rights Society Of Kenya (PRISK), and the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK), collected 249 million shillings in 2023. However, MCSK declared only KSh 109 million shillings. An outrageous 26 million shillings is missing. 
2. MCSK is meant to have distributed 70% of these collections to their rightful beneficiaries, to wit Kenyan artistes, but can only account for 110 million shillings out of the 166 million shillings it should have collected and distributed. 
3. MCSK should have distributed 165 million shillings, but again, 54 million shillings are missing.
4. Google Ireland and YouTube remitted 6 million shillings to be distributed to artistes. That too has gone AWOL.

At the end of March 2021, veteran gospel artiste Reuben Kigame stunned the world when he horrifyingly revealed that he had received a whopping grand total of 40 Kenya shillings as royalties for his music. Yes, you read that right: two twenty-bob coins!

Taking to his Twitter, the musical icon, with hit after hit after hit under his belt in a career spanning some 30-odd years, opened a can of tirade and lambasted politicos and representatives of music copyright bodies in the country. “If you one day hear musician Reuben Kigame is dead, do not allow any government representative or those from the so-called copyright societies to speak at my funeral service,” he wrote. “What I have been through under them is enough.” And in what amounts to an insult to an illustrious career that has seen him churn out an amazing 30 albums, he disclosed in an interview that one diligent royalty body has consistently sent him 40-bob every month without fail for the last several years. “Imagine collecting 40 shillings at my age!” he asked, much to his indignation. And that about sums up the utter chaos and disarray, if not complete incompetence and straightforward corruption, in the music copyright industry: money is being collected, and in bucket-loads, but artistes are not receiving any of it.

And so on Wednesday 21 February 2024, Kenya Copyright Board chairman Joshua Kutuny called an extraordinary presser to address the issue head-on. And the conclusion was only ever headed in one direction. Subsequently, the Kenya Copyright Board through their X handle announced that the Board of Directors had recommended that the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and the Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DCI) take up the matter and investigate MCSK. On his part, Kutuny noted via his X handle that PRISK had presented their financial report to the Board and highlighted that MCSK could not account for 56 million shillings, an amount comprising 26 million shillings received from joint collections and 30 million shillings from foreign-based CMOs and Google Ireland. Which only leaves MCSK supremo Ezekiel Mutua in a right pickle.

Mutua has recently been pulled into a war of words with someone he calls “a State House operative” over the same issue, and has been seen making rounds to media houses in a bid to clear his name. The “State House operative” in question has accused Mutua of misappropriating artistes’ money, money that he has no business coming in contact with to begin with. His clincher is that artistes are earning peanuts as royalties, and yet the fat cats at CMOs are raking in 1.3 million shillings monthly…and Mutua apparently sees no problem with this model. (I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Ezekiel Mutua earns an eye-watering 1,115,850 million shillings per month for his hard work, which includes ensuring that artistes are paid equitably for their music rights.)

As one X observer pithily framed it, “How can one sweat and another live off their sweat? What would the collectors be doing without the musicians? The artistes are in fact the employers of the collectors and should be the ones making the millions, not the reverse!” Julius Nyerere captured this sentiment beautifully in the late 70s when he called Kenya “a man-eat-man society.” Even though Charles Njonjo retorted with, “…And Tanzania is a man-eat-nothing society,” we have not changed that character in almost half a century. “There is time to get angry, especially at evil,” concluded Kigame in his interview. “A society that is not angered by exploitation and evil is dead. There are just not enough angry Kenyans.”