The auction of the soul: Data Concentration as Kenya’s competitive farce against its own privacy
The Mt Kenya Times 
By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
Over 78 million mobile connections now pulse across a nation of roughly 55 million people, while mobile money subscriptions have surged past 54 million and data consumption on 5G alone averages tens of gigabytes per user each month. This is not connectivity. It is the systematic harvesting of Kenyan lives into datasets that travel farther and faster than any colonial railway ever did. Article 31 of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, declares that every person has the right to privacy, the right not to have information relating to their family or private affairs unnecessarily required or revealed, and the right not to have the privacy of their communications infringed. The Data Protection Act of 2019 was enacted precisely to give force to that guarantee. Yet the lived reality is a quiet, continuous auction in which that constitutional promise is the first commodity offered for sale.
History repeats itself with clinical precision. In the late nineteenth century, European powers drew lines across African maps and extracted land, labour and minerals under the banner of civilisation and commerce. Today the extraction is quieter, more intimate, and far more efficient. Data is the new soil. Every M-Pesa transaction, every location ping, every WhatsApp message, every biometric scan for a government service or a Worldcoin token becomes raw material for platforms whose servers sit thousands of kilometres away. The farmers of the Rift Valley once watched their land titles vanish into settler hands; now the same communities watch their behavioural patterns, health indicators and social networks disappear into opaque algorithms controlled by a handful of global giants and a dominant local telecom. The continuity is not accidental. It is structural. Concentration of data creates concentration of power, and concentration of power rewrites the meaning of citizenship.
Consider the correlation that should alarm every regulator and every citizen. Where data is most concentrated, competition withers and privacy becomes optional. Safaricom’s near-monopoly position in mobile money and data carriage gives it an unrivalled view of Kenyan economic and social life. Cloud infrastructure is dominated by a small club of American and Chinese providers. Social platforms and search engines operate as de facto public squares while remaining private fiefdoms. The Competition Authority of Kenya has begun to acknowledge that access to personal data is itself a parameter of competition. Control of data allows a firm to predict, exclude, and shape markets in ways that no traditional barrier to entry ever could. When the same data that fuels market power is also the intimate record of a person’s life, the distinction between competition law and privacy law collapses. One cannot protect the market without protecting the person; one cannot protect the person while permitting the market to devour the person.
The emotional cost is not abstract. A mother in Kibera whose mobile number is reassigned without safeguards discovers that her private communications have become someone else’s. A young man whose facial data was captured for attendance at a public broadcaster learns that the system was rolled out without consent or impact assessment. Millions of Kenyans whose records leaked from a health platform or a government registry wake to the knowledge that their medical histories and identity documents now circulate in the wild. The constitutional right is not a philosophical ornament. It is the thin membrane that separates dignity from exposure. When that membrane is treated as a competitive afterthought, the result is a citizenry that must bargain for basic services with the currency of its own intimacy.
The irony is savage. Kenya markets itself as the Silicon Savannah, a hub for digital innovation and a future data centre powerhouse. Officials speak of monetizing anonymized national datasets and of attracting global investment. The language of progress is loud. The language of accountability is whispered. Anonymization is presented as a shield, yet experts know that re-identification risks rise when datasets are combined. Citizens are told their data will fuel national development while the actual value accrues to entities that answer to distant shareholders and foreign regulators. The plantation logic returns: the labour is local, the profit is external, and the original owners of the resource are left with residual rights that require expensive litigation to enforce.
This is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of will and of institutional coordination. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has issued determinations and ordered deletions. The High Court has repeatedly affirmed that Article 31 stands on its own feet, independent of the Act, and can reach digital identifiers, biometric systems and surveillance practices. The Competition Authority has begun to examine strategic market positions in digital ecosystems and the role of data silos. These are necessary steps. They remain insufficient while the three institutions operate in parallel rather than in concert. Privacy violations that entrench dominance must be treated as competition offences. Dominance that rests on the systematic extraction of personal data must be treated as privacy violations. The artificial separation of the two regimes is a gift to the dominant players.
What, then, must be done? Parliament must accelerate the integration of data considerations into competition law so that control of personal data is explicitly recognised as a source of market power capable of abuse. The Competition Authority must treat privacy-eroding practices as exclusionary conduct when they lock rivals out of markets or lock consumers into platforms. The Data Protection Commissioner must receive the resources and independence required to move beyond individual complaints into systemic investigations of the largest data controllers. The judiciary must continue to insist that constitutional privacy is not exhausted by statutory remedies and that novel digital harms fall within Article 31’s protective reach. Government itself must abandon the fantasy that it can monetize citizen data at scale while pretending the risks of re-identification and secondary use are theoretical. Citizens must demand, as a condition of every public service and every private platform, clear, specific, and withdrawable consent and they must treat the refusal of that demand as a political act.
The deeper insight is this: privacy is not the opposite of progress. It is the precondition of a digital society that remains human. When data concentration is allowed to dictate the terms of competition, the citizen is reduced to a data subject whose only remaining freedom is the freedom to be profiled. Kenya has walked this road before. The land was taken, the labour extracted, the culture dismissed. The digital enclosure now underway is more total because it reaches into the mind and the body at once. The Constitution of 2010 was written precisely so that this generation would not repeat the dispossession of earlier ones. To treat privacy as a competitive parameter rather than a non-negotiable right is to auction the soul of the republic for the temporary advantage of a few platforms. That auction must stop. The actors who hold the gavel; regulators, lawmakers, judges, citizens must refuse to sell.
The writer is a social commentator
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