Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja has claimed to be the architect of Nigeria's Start-Up Act, saying he helped draft the bill when he was Nairobi's senator. He alluded to this while speaking at the opening ceremony of the Amazon His Web Service Development Center on Wednesday, saying that as a senator he enacted legislation to protect Kenyan startups from risks in the technology ecosystem.
Sakaja added that although several factors prevented the passage of this law, some Nigerians on his team stole the idea and brought it back to their country where it was implemented.
“In the Senate, I sat down and looked at Twiga, Cellulant, Sendy and these startups that were scaling up. Twiga had the potential to be Kenya’s first government-backed unicorn.” I asked them many years ago what the government can do to get you to where you are now, and we came up with the startup setup. ” he said.
"This bill provided for de-risking some of these investments. Unfortunately, some of my team when we were building it were from Nigeria. .They approved and passed that bill in Nigeria. So Nigeria has a start-up law, which was drafted by the Nairobi governor, but we don't have a start-up law."