28/10/2025
The Billion-Rand Blind Spot: How Behavioural Bias Turned Millions into Maybes
When Kenneth Makate rejected Vodacom’s R47 million offer for his “Please Call Me” idea, many saw a man standing his ground. He’d won moral victory — the courts affirmed his idea was valid and deserved reward. But through a behavioural economics lens, it’s hard to avoid a different conclusion: this decision may have cost him the very financial freedom he was fighting for.
1. The Money That Could Have Been
Let’s start with the numbers — because numbers don’t take sides.
Had Makate accepted Vodacom’s R47 million in 2016, bought a home for R5 million in a security estate, and invested the remaining R42 million prudently at a reasonable after-tax return of 8% per year, his position today would be vastly different.
Nine years later, by 2025, his net worth would likely sit around R82 million — that’s after drawing R1 million annually for living expenses. The house alone would have appreciated to roughly R7.7 million, and his investment portfolio to about R75 million.
Fast-forward another 15 years and, if left to compound, that portfolio could exceed R260 million by 2040. Not theoretical wealth — tangible, compounding capital. He’d be financially independent, diversified, and still young enough to enjoy it.
Instead, he’s still in court. Still waiting. And still uncertain.
2. Anchoring: When the First Big Number Warps Reality
When legal models started floating compensation figures of R9 billion or more, they didn’t just change the math — they changed the psychology. Behavioural economics calls this anchoring bias: once your mind latches onto a large number, smaller — though still massive — amounts feel inadequate.
R47 million stopped being a windfall and started feeling like an insult. But fairness is an emotional construct, not a financial one. Anchors distort judgment; they make us chase symbolic victory at the expense of strategic gain.
3. Sunk Costs: The Trap of “I’ve Come Too Far”
By 2016, Makate had already spent more than a decade fighting Vodacom. The longer the fight went on, the harder it became to stop. That’s sunk cost fallacy — the tendency to keep investing time and emotion simply because so much has already been spent.
It’s the same trap that keeps investors holding a losing stock — not because it will rebound, but because selling feels like admitting defeat. For Makate, walking away would have meant letting go of two decades of effort, legal fees, and public sympathy. Yet in behavioural terms, every extra year in court is an additional investment in uncertainty.
4. The Lottery Effect: Chasing the Jackpot
The lottery effect describes how people overvalue tiny probabilities of huge gains. The possibility of billions acted like a psychological magnet. Even though the probability of that outcome was small — tied to uncertain revenue models, legal appeals, and time value — the scale of the potential payout dominated the decision-making frame.
The irony is sharp: in fighting for billions that may never materialise, Makate sacrificed the guaranteed path to being a multimillionaire today.
5. Regret Aversion: The Fear of Missing Out on “More”
There’s another bias at play — regret aversion. What if he accepted R47 million and later saw the courts award billions? That single thought can paralyse rational choice. People often prefer inaction to action when both could lead to regret. It feels safer to wait, even when waiting carries higher cost.
But time is the most expensive currency. The longer he waits, the less valuable any future payout becomes — even if he wins.
6. The Illusion of Control: When Persistence Feels Like Progress
Makate’s determination is admirable, but behavioural research shows that persistence can morph into the illusion of control — the belief that our effort influences outcomes more than it actually does. Courts, corporations, and compound interest don’t respond to passion. They respond to process.
After 20 years, persistence has stopped building leverage and started eroding opportunity.
7. The Rational Counterfactual
If Makate had reframed the R47 million not as “settlement” but as “seed capital,” the story would read differently. He’d own property, have a multi-million-rand portfolio, and be drawing passive income exceeding R3 million a year today — enough to live comfortably and fund new ventures, advocacy, or philanthropy.
The principle of loss aversion reminds us that people feel losses roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains. Ironically, his fight for fairness — to avoid the pain of “losing out” — has produced the very loss he feared.
8. The Final Bias: Justice Over Judgment
Behavioural economics doesn’t diminish Makate’s moral claim. It simply highlights the cost of letting emotions drive economic choices. What began as a battle for recognition became, over time, a behavioural spiral — where fairness outweighed finance, and possibility eclipsed probability.
Today, he could have been a quietly wealthy man. A self-made multimillionaire with his name secured in South African business history. Instead, he’s still chasing a verdict that, even if it arrives, will never compensate for the lost compound years.
The “Please Call Me” story isn’t just about invention. It’s about cognition. It reminds us that in high-stakes decisions, the greatest adversary isn’t always the corporation — it’s our own mind.
Because sometimes, the price of holding out for billions… is the certainty of millions.
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