Kenya Copyright Board is revising its guidelines for regulating CMOs- What is critical to streamline CMOs in Kenya?

I think it is critical for KECOBO to spell out clearly the limits and mandate for each collecting society. Kenya’s CMO scene’ is laden with CMOS all demanding royalties and claiming to collect for ‘their’ members. This is especially exasperating in music royalties.
First, there is often a duplicity in members, with an artiste’ (say a ‘musician’) being a member of PRISK and MCSK for example. Secondly, the rights that such members ‘give’ or cede to the CMO are not always worth the paper they are written on. Oftentimes, it is actually the music producer (who is then a member of KAMP) who has the economic rights in a particular piece of music (a song). So, when PRISK, KAMP and MCSK come knocking with each asking for royalty payments on behalf of their members for a licence to use/play a song, my knee-jerk reaction is usually to say I will not pay anything until it is clear to whom, why and for what I am paying. But that does not solve the problem. There should be a clear and transparent way for any licensee to ascertain that these CMOs have the rights they claim they do- so evidence of assignment of rights in the music and evidence that the assigned rights exist in the first place! Actually, most licensees usually want to pay for the music, in a sense to pay for the right holders ‘sweat of the brow’. The problem is the current convoluted way in which CMOs operate in Kenya.
I would recommend and suggest that KECOBO puts in place, as part of its supervisory role, a recording system for all rights that CMOs have. For example, this means having a database of members and their copyright protected works which also has documents evidencing their claim to ownership of copyright (say an artiste/musician saying he ‘sang’ the song meaning he has a copyright in the performance etc). This database can then be open to investigation by licencees who would wish to ascertain claims as to ownership of copyright in order to determine the veracity of the claims by CMOs.
In my experience, music producers tend to be assigned to all copyright in the music (assigned to by the other copyright owners) and in such a case, the performer/artiste’ would not have any residual economic rights in the song, and accordingly, a CMO claiming to collect royalties on behalf of such an artiste for that particular song would have no entitlement to royalty payments.
I therefore think it is essential for KECOBO to put in place mandatory rules on how/where these CMOs have their rights and the repertoire of music or publications etc that each has rights in respect of.
This, I believe, will really sanitize the copyright royalty collection situation in Kenya.