Many ordinary Kenyans put their money into Ziidi expecting it to grow quietly while sitting in M-Pesa. The product is sold as a simple way to earn something on idle balances. You move as little as a hundred shillings across, there are no transfer fees, and a daily rate appears on the app or when you dial the USSD code. On paper it looks clean. In practice people keep running into the same problem.
They check their balance after a few days or weeks and find the numbers do not add up. That is exactly what Patrobas Ojwang raised when he asked Safaricom where his five hundred and four shillings disappeared to.
He wanted a straight answer on whether the fifteen percent withholding tax is taken from the money he sends in or only from whatever the fund claims to have earned.
The question is not complicated, yet it keeps coming up because the platform never shows the arithmetic in plain view.
Official statements say the tax applies only to the income generated by the fund. The two percent management fee is already removed before the daily rate is displayed.
In theory the capital stays whole and only the interest portion is reduced. But theory and the screen in front of a customer are two different things. Most users never receive a clear breakdown that lists the gross interest, the fee already taken, the tax deducted, and the final amount added to their Ziidi wallet.
They simply see a balance that is lower than the sum of what they deposited plus the rates they remember reading. When the shortfall is a few hundred shillings the natural reaction is to ask where the money went.
Calling customer care or reading the terms later does not remove the feeling that something was taken without proper explanation at the moment it happened.
This gap between what is promised and what is shown is the real issue. Ziidi sits inside M-Pesa, a service almost every adult in the country already trusts for daily transactions.
That trust is being stretched. People are not asking for complicated investment reports. They want a short message after each interest credit that shows the exact figures. Gross amount earned.
Tax removed. Net amount added. Until that happens, every unexplained difference looks like a loss. The company can point to the tax law and the published fee structure, but those answers arrive only after someone has already gone public with a complaint.
By then the damage is done.
The problem grows because the product targets ordinary savers, not professional investors. Wage earners, small traders and people holding emergency money are the ones moving small sums into Ziidi.
When five hundred shillings vanishes from their view they feel the loss directly. They do not have the time or the tools to dig through statements or calculate daily compounding themselves.
Clear communication is not a luxury for them. It is the minimum required for the product to remain credible. Safaricom and the fund managers collect volume from millions of these small deposits. They therefore carry the greater duty to make every deduction obvious.
Until the platform shows the full picture in simple numbers that anyone can follow, questions like the one Patrobas asked will keep appearing. Each unanswered question chips away at the confidence that once made M-Pesa feel safe.
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