Twiga Meals, a Kenyan B2B startup, has been ordered to pay a former gross sales consultant over KES 1 million ($7,800) after the Employment and Labour Relations Courtroom discovered that his dismissal was unfair.
In a judgment delivered just about on October 9, Justice Linnet Ndolo dominated that Twiga wrongfully fired Maxton Duke Kibira in December 2018, after accusing him of “poor efficiency” with out offering proof to again it up. The courtroom mentioned the corporate neither gave Kibira a transparent job description nor adopted due course of earlier than terminating his employment.
The judgment provides to a string of current labour disputes which might be forcing Kenya’s tech startups to take office rights extra critically. In April, the courtroom ordered neobank Umba to pay KES 2.88 million ($22,300) for unfairly dismissing an govt after failing to doc efficiency targets. That very same month, judges faulted Dawa Life Sciences for paying completely different salaries for a similar function, a choice that despatched ripples by means of tech startups with opaque pay constructions.
Kibira, who joined Twiga in 2015, incomes roughly KES 100,000 ($774) month-to-month, advised the courtroom that he had been subjected to unrealistic gross sales targets, pressured time beyond regulation, and fixed transfers between stations. He additionally claimed that Twiga unlawfully deducted KES 426,000 ($3,298) from his wage, allegedly for unbanked money, calling it a “surcharge” for which he was by no means given an opportunity to dispute.
“The respondent’s witness was unable to level out any proof of poor efficiency,” the choose famous, including that the corporate’s deductions from Kibira’s wage had been “unilateral” and breached labour legislation procedures. She additionally faulted Twiga for punishing him twice for a similar difficulty, by docking his pay after which firing him.
Twiga argued that Kibira had constantly underperformed regardless of a number of warnings and that the deductions had been linked to bonuses he hadn’t earned. Nevertheless, Justice Ndolo mentioned that the corporate failed to offer any proof of poor efficiency or to display that Kibira had been given assist to enhance.
The courtroom awarded Kibira six months’ wage as compensation, plus a refund of the irregular deductions, amounting to a complete of KES 1.026 million ($7,800), with curiosity.
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