Angola’s copyright regulator spent 2021 telling a mobile phone giant it owed a songwriters’ society money. By 2024, the same regulator had taken away that society’s right to collect money from anyone at all. No document found by Afrobeats Wire shows the two events are connected, and no document shows whether the original bill was ever paid. That gap, not a settled outcome, is the story.
The claim: 453 million kwanza for a ringback tone#
SADIA, the Sociedade Angolana de Direitos de Autor, is Angola’s oldest music copyright collecting society, founded in 1990 to collect and distribute royalties owed to composers and songwriters whenever their work is played on radio, television, in commercial premises or, in this case, down a phone line.
In June 2020, SADIA notified Unitel, Angola’s largest mobile network operator, that it owed royalties for music used in two of Unitel’s own services: “Toque de Espera,” a paid ringback-tone product that plays a song instead of a ring when someone calls a Unitel subscriber, and “Kisom,” a Unitel-branded music app. By the time Angolan business newspaper Expansão reported on the dispute in a 1 August 2021 article, the figure SADIA was demanding had grown to 453 million kwanza, calculated as accruing from that first notification.
Expansão reported that Angola’s copyright regulator, SENADIAC (the Serviço Nacional de Direitos de Autor e Conexos, a body under the Ministry of Culture), had already ruled on the underlying question of who was entitled to be paid, and had ruled for SADIA. SENADIAC’s stated reasoning, as reported: Unitel had named six companies it said it already paid on the artists’ behalf, LS Republicano, Go Edições, Sygnius, Arca Velha, Bom Som and Grupo Chialo, and none of them was a certified collective-management entity under Angolan law. The rights to the music in question, SENADIAC found, had been entrusted to SADIA, and payment was owed through it.
A telecom giant that said no#
Unitel’s public response, also reported by Expansão, was not to dispute that it owed royalties to someone. It was to dispute that it owed them to SADIA specifically. Unitel said it already paid the artists’ representatives directly, and that it would pay SADIA too, but only if SADIA could prove that the specific artists in its services were registered exclusively with SADIA and had not already been compensated through one of the six companies Unitel named.
SADIA told Expansão it had supplied exactly that proof, in July 2021, “without result.” Rather than go straight to Angolan courts, which it said remained an option, SADIA escalated the dispute to a party with real leverage over Unitel: Apple, which hosts the Kisom app on its platform. A follow-up Expansão report, carried by Angolan outlet pti.ao on 20 December 2021, said Apple had asked Unitel for proof it was paying royalties on the music used in Kisom. Unitel supplied a licensing contract with LS Republicano, one of the six companies it had already named. Apple did not accept the document as sufficient proof.
That is where the trail, as far as this desk can establish it, stops. Afrobeats Wire searched Angolan and international press for any update between 2022 and 2026: a court filing, a settlement, a confirmed payment, a statement from either side that the matter had closed. None turned up. Neither SADIA nor Unitel has put a public update on record since the Apple intervention, at least not one this desk could locate and read.
Three years later, the regulator that ruled for SADIA shut it down#
On 8 August 2024, Angolan newspaper O País reported that SENADIAC, the same regulator that had sided with SADIA against Unitel in 2021, had cancelled SADIA’s authorisation to operate as a collective-management entity. SADIA’s licence, granted in September 2019, was revoked outright. SENADIAC’s stated ground, per O País: SADIA had not performed its functions as a collecting society for almost two years.
Two other Angolan collecting societies were caught in the same action. UNAC-SA and AUDAC each had their authorisations suspended for 180 days, not cancelled, over what SENADIAC described as serious irregularities in how all three organisations collected and distributed copyright royalties, and a failure to file the periodic collection and distribution reports that Angolan law, specifically Decree-Law No. 114/16 of 30 May, requires. SENADIAC’s director-general, Barros Licença, said the pattern undermined state authority and harmed authors’ own rights and expectations.
AUDAC’s director-general, Lucioval Gama, pushed back in public, arguing that only Angola’s Minister of Culture, not SENADIAC’s own director, had the legal power to suspend or cancel a collecting society’s authorisation, and that AUDAC had already filed a hierarchical appeal to the minister days earlier. He said AUDAC would go to court if the minister did not respond within five days. This desk found no report of how that appeal was resolved, for AUDAC or for SADIA, and no report of SADIA mounting a similar public challenge.
What is, and is not, established here#
Three things matter and are not established by any document this desk read, and this record does not guess at any of them. First, whether Unitel ever paid any part of the 453 million kwanza, to SADIA or to the six companies it named instead. Second, whether the “almost two years” of non-performance SENADIAC cited against SADIA in 2024 overlaps with the period of the Unitel dispute, which would raise an obvious question about whether SADIA was actively representing the composers it claimed to represent while that claim was pending. Third, what became of SADIA’s claim against Unitel once SADIA’s own authority to collect was cancelled. No source names a successor entity that inherited the claim, and no source says it was simply dropped.
What is not in dispute, and what this record is careful not to blur, is the underlying ownership of the songs themselves. Nothing in SENADIAC’s 2021 ruling, SADIA’s dispute with Unitel, or SADIA’s 2024 licence cancellation transfers, sells or assigns a single composition. A collecting society’s licence is a mandate to collect and distribute royalties on behalf of rights holders who have joined it; it is not a copyright, and losing it does not touch who wrote or owns a song.
What this means for artists#
For an Angolan songwriter whose work played on Unitel’s ringback-tone service, the practical lesson is blunt: the organisation that spent a year telling a telecom company it was failing composers was itself found, by the same regulator, to be failing at the basic job of running a collecting society. Being owed money and being paid money are two different facts, and a court or regulatory ruling that you are owed something is not the same as collecting it. SADIA’s dispute with Unitel ran for at least eighteen months, through a regulator’s ruling and an appeal to Apple, without (on the public record this desk can find) producing a payment.
The wider lesson travels beyond Angola. Across the collecting-society landscape this desk has tracked, from Kenya’s KECOBO dispute with MCSK to Zimbabwe’s ZIMURA board dissolution to Nigeria’s frozen N1.2 billion levy fight, the same shape recurs: a society asserts a mandate, a payer resists, a regulator intervenes, and the question of whether composers actually see the money often goes unanswered in public documents long after the dispute itself stops making news. An artist whose royalties run through any collecting society, in Angola or elsewhere, is relying on an institution whose own standing with its regulator can change without much public notice. Checking that a society’s authorisation is current, and asking directly what has been collected and distributed on your behalf, costs nothing and is not something any regulator’s ruling can substitute for.
Afrobeats Wire sources every claim in this piece to Angolan trade press this desk fetched and read directly: Expansão’s reporting from 1 August 2021 and December 2021 on the SADIA-Unitel dispute, and O País’s reporting from 9 August 2024 on SENADIAC’s cancellation of SADIA’s licence. This desk could not locate SENADIAC’s own ruling documents in either matter, and reports their contents as described in that press coverage. Readers with access to SENADIAC’s underlying filings are invited to send them to this desk.