CALL ME VICTORIOUS

It's taken more than two decades but Nkosana Makate, better known as the Please Call Me guy, has scored a crucial victory in his battle against Vodacom - and it could make him one of SA's richest men

- CARLA COETZEE

ALOT has happened in his life over the past two-and-a-half decades: he’s settled into married life, watched his three children grow and built a successful career as a financial director.

But in all this time not a day has gone by when Nkosana Makate didn’t think about the David-and-Goliath battle he was locked in with one of South Africa’s biggest companies.

Nkosana (47) is better known as “the Please Call Me guy”. He was working as an intern at Vodacom in 1995 when he came up with the concept of allow- ing customers who were out of airtime to send “Please Call Me” SMSes.

His bosses could see the potential in the idea and promised Nkosana, who was then 18, that he’d be rewarded for it.

But even though he ended up working for the cellphone company for eight years, Nkosana says no monetary reward ever materialised.

Eventually he realised the only way to make Vodacom pay up would be to take them to court.

At the time he had no idea of the epic battle that lay ahead of him. “I was naive but maybe it’s better that way. Otherwise, I might not have had the stomach for it,” he says.

But he was recently vindicated when the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein ruled resoundingly in his favour, ordering Vodacom to pay him between 5% and 7,5% of the total revenue generated by the Please Call Me service from 2001 to 2021 – plus interest.

According to my broadband.co.za, this means he stands to walk away with between R28,9 billion and R55,3bn – an amount that could make him the fifth richest person in South Africa after Johann Rupert, Patrice Motsepe, Koos Bekker and Nicky Oppenheimer.

But it was never about the money, he says. It was the principle of the matter.