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Egypt may have found a way to keep more of its fintech value at home. MNT-Halan has been in talks since June to list its Egyptian-only business on the Egyptian Exchange, while keeping its operations in markets—such as the UAE, Turkey, and Pakistan—private. Nigeria, meanwhile, is facing the opposite situation: fintechs including OPay and PalmPay are looking at foreign listings. The Nigerian Exchange Group is now asking the government to encourage major fintechs to list locally, or at least alongside foreign listings, arguing that Nigerian investors should also have a chance to benefit from companies built on the country’s market.

What would it take for Nigeria to make staying home as attractive as going abroad? 

Let’s dive in.

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Kenya’s High Court has temporarily stopped NCBA Bank Kenya, one of the country’s largest lenders, from taking control of troubled logistics company Multiple Hauliers (EA) Ltd.

Here’s what happened: NCBA says the transporter owes it KES 7.2 billion ($55.7 million). The bank appointed two administrators from consulting firm PwC to take over the company and rescue it or recover money for creditors. Under Kenyan insolvency law, administration is similar to putting a company under external management: the administrators can run the business, control assets, and decide whether it can be saved or should be sold.

Multiple Hauliers challenged the appointment in court. A judge has now issued a temporary order blocking the PwC administrators from acting as administrators or taking charge of the company until the case is heard on September 25.

Why does this matter? The dispute is much bigger than a single bank loan. Multiple Hauliers reportedly has more than KES 31 billion ($240 million) in claims from various Kenyan lenders and creditors, while its assets are estimated at KES 17 billion ($131.5 million), according to local publication Business Daily. Major banks including KCB, Co-operative Bank, I&M Bank, and others are also exposed.

Between the lines: NCBA has not acquired Multiple Hauliers and does not currently control its operations or assets. The court has merely paused the takeover attempt while it decides whether the bank’s appointment of administrators was lawful.

The bigger signal is about Kenya’s credit market. When a large logistics company spends years moving between restructuring talks, administration attempts, and liquidation proceedings, lenders recover their money more slowly, which can make banks more cautious about financing transport and logistics businesses across the economy.

Zoom out: NCBA is in the middle of a KES 116.3 billion ($794 million) takeover by South African lender Nedbank. On July 21, Nedbank confirmed that it had secured a 66% stake in the Kenyan bank, clearing its path to take control of NCBA. The Multiple Hauliers case shows that one of the bank’s largest corporate debt disputes is still unresolved as the takeover process moves forward.

When it comes to policy drafting, South Africa seems to be putting the bigger battles—such as regulating AI—on hold and focusing on a problem that affects far more people every day: what children can watch online.

The country is drafting rules that could force social media platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok, to introduce age-verification systems for content deemed harmful or distressing to children.

What happened? The proposal is part of a draft online safety framework being developed by the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT), the South African government ministry responsible for communications, broadcasting, telecommunications, and digital policy. 

The same framework would also create an online content ombudsman to handle complaints involving misinformation, harmful content, and material considered unsuitable for minors.

Explain like I’m new here: The government is not banning YouTube and TikTok for children. It is saying that platforms may need stronger systems to decide who is old enough to view certain content. The draft draws heavily from the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s social media restrictions for under-16s. Those models go well beyond the familiar “Yes, I am over 18” checkbox. The UK framework, for example, allows measures such as facial age estimation, ID uploads, or credit-card checks for restricted content.

Between the lines: The proposal would also encourage age ratings on uploaded videos and stronger parental control tools. The interesting part is the scope creep. The white paper is not only about child safety; it is also examining whether global streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ should face a regulatory and tax treatment closer to that of South African broadcasters.

The policy is not law yet. The government is still reviewing submissions from industry groups, media organisations, and digital rights advocates, and the consultation process remains open.

Zoom out: South Africa is joining a growing list of countries trying to answer an uncomfortable question: how do you protect children online without exposing every other user to the same rigorous ID checks? The technology industry has not found an answer yet, and South Africa is about to test whether regulators can do any better.

Imagine running a Nigerian fintech, streaming platform, or AI startup, but the servers powering your product are sitting in another country and being paid for in US dollars. That is the problem Nigeria says it wants to fix.

What’s going on? The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the country’s digital economy regulator, says more than 85% of Nigerian workloads now run on public clouds, while over 90% of enterprise data is hosted offshore. Nigeria also hosts only 22% of its 1,000 most-visited websites locally, well below the Sub-Saharan African average of 34%.

Explain like I’m new here: A “workload” is simply the software and data that keep an app, website, bank, or government service running. When those workloads are hosted abroad, Nigerian companies often pay foreign cloud providers in dollars, which becomes painful whenever the naira weakens.

In June, local publication Business Day reported that stakeholders in Nigeria’s digital ecosystem estimated that the country loses about $850 million annually to foreign digital platforms, domains, and offshore data hosting.

Between the lines: The government’s answer is a new National Sovereign Cloud Initiative, signed with Galaxy Backbone, the government-owned digital infrastructure provider. The idea is not to ban global cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Nigeria wants them to build and operate more infrastructure inside the country.

The policy is also a reaction to the March 2024 West African submarine cable outages, when damage to four major undersea cables disrupted internet connectivity across the region and exposed how dependent critical digital services are on international infrastructure.

Zoom out: Nigeria is putting guardrails to control its own digital economy infrastructure. If more cloud infrastructure moves onshore, companies could pay in naira instead of dollars, local data centre operators could win a bigger share of the market, and Nigeria would have a stronger chance of becoming a cloud hub for West and Central Africa. The unanswered question is the one startups care about most: can local cloud providers match the price, reliability, and scale that global hyperscalers already offer?

If you are a Kenyan business owner, accountant, freelancer, or startup founder, the High Court has a new message for you: fighting a bill from the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the country’s tax authority, now requires more than submitting boxes of invoices, receipts, and bank statements and expecting KRA to piece the story together itself.

What happened? The ruling came from a dispute involving KES 29.2 million ($225,000) in additional income tax and value-added tax (VAT) assessments. KRA found that the company’s corporation tax returns did not match the purchases reported in its monthly VAT filings for 2017–2020.

The company argued that it had provided large amounts of financial records. The Tax Appeals Tribunal accepted that argument and ruled in its favour. KRA appealed, and the High Court overturned the decision.

Explain like I’m new here: Imagine KRA says your VAT return shows KES 10 million ($155,000) in purchases, but your income tax return shows KES 7 million ($54,155). Before this ruling, some taxpayers could submit hundreds of pages of records and argue that the correct explanation was buried somewhere in the documents. The court has now said that is not enough.

You must identify the exact records that explain the KES 3 million ($23,200) difference and show how the figures reconcile.

How does this affect you? It shifts the tax compliance burden onto taxpayers. Businesses will now need cleaner bookkeeping, stronger audit trails, and well-organised reconciliations before filing objections against KRA assessments.

The bigger picture: The ruling gives KRA a stronger position in tax disputes. Businesses that rely mainly on receipts, invoices, and bank statements may now need to do more than simply submit those documents—they now need to organise them properly. They will also need to show clearly how the records support the figures reported in their tax returns.

Kenya is signaling that treating accounting as an afterthought could make it much harder to win a dispute with the taxman.