Nkosana Makate cleared the first of three hurdles in 2014 when a judge found that he had invented Please Call Me, then the second in 2016 when the Constitutional Court deemed he had a valid contract with Vodacom.
Yet the third – determining just how much he could lay claim to – proved elusive during Makate’s two-decade fight with the mobile giant.
For Makate to claim a share of the money he said Vodacom had earned from his invention, he needed to know how much Vodacom made from the service. And that required data that, depending on which version is believed, either doesn’t exist, or was never made available to him.
However, before the money talk, Makate first had to have a court rule to establish that he had invented the solution; going up against Vodacom’s first CEO, Alan Knott-Craig, who claimed in court and a 2009 book that he originated Please Call Me.
Yet, in a 2014 decision, Judge Phillip Coppin found Makate developed the service, saying he had “difficulty” with Knott-Craig’s evidence, including “his, what I consider, rather equivocal, evidence regarding whether he had described the plaintiff as being greedy and had decided that the plaintiff should get nothing”. (ITWeb unpacked that case in: The Please Call Me millions: Makate’s first case was ‘FUBR’)
During the same ruling – although ruling that Makate had a valid contract – Coppin said any claim he may have had expired some years ago. Makate successfully overturned that in 2016.
Data? What data?
With the contract upheld, the question of how much Makate was owed remained. That hinged on data neither side could agree existed.
Throughout Makate’s entire two-decade battle, Vodacom argued there was no data because it hadn’t kept any; a position it maintained at the final hearing in the Constitutional Court last year.
“Vodacom simply cannot collect objective data to record those calls that would not have been made but for Please Call Me,” Vodacom says in its heads of argument ahead of those hearings.
The operator notes: “There is also no way to ‘retain’ this data as Makate suggests – there is simply no way to determine in the mind of a caller the relationship between a PCM sent to them and a ‘corresponding or induced’ call.”
Best laid plans
In 2011, in a case where Makate sought data ahead of suing Vodacom for payment, Judge Brian Spilg ordered Vodacom to provide all “the records reflecting all Please Call Me product calls since the beginning of 2000 to date”.
While this specific discovery process was subsequently dropped, Vodacom had, in fact, determined that records should be kept, with 2016 court documents recording that Vodacom’s then financial director, Johan van der Watt, suggested a plan to track Please Call Me-initiated calls to Vodacom’s then MD, Andrew Mthembu.
In this mail, Van der Watt noted “there is potential for increase in revenue [sic]”, but flagged that changing call patterns made it hard to determine whether the service would offset any losses. Mthembu agreed, suggesting information be gathered to understand calling patterns and remove uncertainty over profitability.
In July 2013, Vodacom decided not to track “revenues because there were many factors that could have made the results unreliable”. Makate’s heads of papers ahead of the first Constitutional Court hearing record that Vodacom “assumed” the concept led to an increase in revenue but “we have not explicitly calculated if this occurred”.
Yet, in June 2020, Pretoria High Court Judge Narandran Kollapen ordered the mobile operator to provide data and financial information because this was “pivotal in that process and in the determination of the relief sought”.
Loss or success?
By Vodacom’s own account, it was losing R25.4 million a day because it could not introduce the planned 15c-per-message charge after the six-month free period. MTN had launched a similar service at the same time, effectively preventing Vodacom from charging for the service.
Vodacom also spent between R1.5 million and R6 million developing the solution.
SA’s largest cellular operator also claims the service was a “big success”. Court papers refer to its March 2001 newsletter as saying “on the first day of operation, about 140 000 customers made use of the service”. As the Constitutional Court wrote in 2016: “It is common cause that this product has generated revenue amounting to billions of rands.”
Knott-Craig claimed in his 2009 autobiography, “Second is nothing − creating a multibillion-rand cellular industry”, that his “concept generated hundreds of millions in revenue”.
(In announcements to staff, Vodacom called the solution a “world first” but then variously said MTN either pipped it to the post, or launched at a similar time. It would appear that the only judges, across the 700 pages and eight judgements publicly available, to pick up on this were Schippers and Fayeeza Kathree-Setiloane, who wrote the minority judgement in a 2024 Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) case that ultimately ordered Vodacom to pay Makate between 5% and 7.5% of a to-be-determined amount.)
Schippers and Kathree-Setiloane record that Vodacom’s estimated net revenue gain was between R25.4 million (coincidentally the same amount that Vodacom said in 2024 it was losing a day) and R6.7 million, while pointing out that “the financial impact of Please Call Me had only been estimated and no thorough research was conducted” and that “no feasibility studies had been performed” to understand customer behaviour.
The math
Left with no apparent data, given that Vodacom said it only kept call history for six months – a fact to which several judges referred – figures had to be modelled instead.
“The evidence showed that Vodacom retains only six months of operational data at a time, and this data makes no direct link between PCM and return calls. Consequently, the CEO concluded that assumptions and estimates had to be made. Indeed, both parties did so in their various models,” wrote Schippers and Kathree-Setiloane.
The modelling was based on a 3 to 14 July 2017 data-mining exercise, undertaken under strict confidentiality, with data pulled from six months of every Please Call Me message, six months of call-data records covering voice calls and messaging, and prepaid records showing zero-airtime balances when the messages were sent.
Schippers and Kathree-Setiloane record that Makate’s team told Vodacom that the extracted data was sufficient for his experts to develop and modify their model, and he later declined additional data-mining opportunities.
Rands and cents
CEO Shameel Joosub’s calculations, based on four scenarios, led to a January 2019 offer of R47 million. Makate, however, felt that he was due anywhere between R9.4 billion and R20.2 billion – with later court papers mentioning a claimed amount of as much as R63 billion when total interest was included.
The two were in talks from 2016, when the Constitutional Court ordered negotiation, until 2019, when Makate pulled out after the R47 million offer, which led to the 2020 SCA ruling.
Vodacom appealed that order defining the percentage of the settlement and, in mid-2025, the Constitutional Court ruled the matter must be reheard by a new SCA bench, after finding that most of the judges had disregarded evidence, resulting in a “total failure of justice”.
Before that rehearing could take place, the matter was finally settled between the parties at the end of last year, which was when the man suing Makate for 40% of these winnings on the basis of bankrolling the lawsuit – Errol Elsdon – reappeared. (ITWeb will unpack additional details of that bid next week.)
Because that deal was confidential, we again have no numbers. However, Peter Takaendesa, chief investment officer at Mergence Investment Managers, has estimated the settlement at around R660 million. Elsdon pegs the settlement at R1 billion.
The series so far
Given that this is a multi-article series, the prior ones are listed below in chronological order:
14 July 2026
The Please Call Me millions: The cast of characters
ITWeb investigation: Makate says Black Rock was Elsdon's ‘alter ego’
21 July 2026
The Please Call Me millions: Makate’s first case was ‘FUBR’
28 July 2026
The Please Call Me millions: The Bermuda Triangle
4 August 2026
The Please Call Me millions: The ghost in the deal
12 August 2026
The Please Call Me millions: Accusations fly
18 August 2026
The Please Call Me millions: Three strikes for Raining Men’s rescuer
Share
