PREMIUM Mutuma Mathiu: Kenya Information and Communication Bill a solution looking for a problem Our Columnists Just now Listen

If lawmakers want to pass a genuine consumer Bill, let it have a price safeguard, a dataminimisation clause, strict limits on what CA may do with data usage records, and an independent complaints mechanism with teeth.

These are the benefits worth protecting: the competition among operators that keeps prices from running wild, the universal service money meant for the places the market ignores, the mobile-money rails that turned a phone into a bank, and the open, low-friction internet that let a boda boda, a mama mboga and a Form Four leaver find some use for a smartphone without first proving to the state who they are and what they were doing with it.

So the question which, as Njuri Ncheke elders, we are obliged to ask, and which I now put to Parliament with all humility, is this: if the Bill does not make data cheaper, and does not by itself protect anyone from anything the courts and the Consumer Protection Act do not already cover, what, in the name of roast goat heads, is it for?