👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – New landlord, same old tenant
In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Happy Eid ul-Mawlid. It’s a packed newsletter today. Let’s get into it. Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read previous editions here first and subscribe below. Subscribe MTN secures Nigeria’s approval for IHS deal MTN’s new data centre company Kenya’s gambling regulator to reinstate fees Tighter border-crossing monitoring between Kenya, Uganda World Wide Web 3 Opportunities M&A MTN secures Nigeria’s approval to acquire IHS Towers Image Source: Tenor MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecom company, has cleared a major hurdle in its $2.2 billion takeover of IHS Towers in Nigeria. But regulators have ensured the telecom giant doesn’t get the whole tower cake. What happened? Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), the competition watchdog, has given MTN conditional approval to acquire the remaining stake in IHS, with one important catch: MTN must sell up to 30% of its stake in IHS Nigeria to local investors at market prices over time. Between the lines: The condition is aimed at preventing MTN from having too much control over the infrastructure its competitors depend on. IHS Nigeria operates nearly 16,000 towers used by MTN Nigeria, Airtel, and T2 Mobile (formerly 9mobile). In other words, MTN is buying the landlord while remaining one of the biggest tenants. Explain like I’m new here: In February, MTN agreed to buy the remaining 19.2% of IHS Towers Nigeria for about $2.2 billion, after already holding a stake in the tower company. The deal would make MTN the majority owner of one of Africa’s biggest tower operators, giving it more control over infrastructure used by rival telcos State of play: MTN will retain majority ownership, giving it greater control over network expansion, costs and capacity while still allowing competitors access to the towers. The deal could also help MTN recover some of the capital tied up in the acquisition and reduce pressure on its balance sheet. The bigger issue is whether infrastructure ownership can deliver efficiency without weakening competition. Towers are becoming increasingly important as operators expand mobile broadband and 5G networks, making control of them strategically valuable. Zoom out. For MTN, the FCCPC approval means the IHS deal is moving closer to completion. But in Nigeria’s telecom market, owning the towers comes with a reminder from regulators: you can be the landlord, just don’t change the rent because you own the building. Every business owner needs to watch this. The business questions you Google, answered by experts. Watch for free. Companies MTN is building a home for Africa’s AI ambitions Image Source: Tenor MTN wants to do more than connect Africa’s businesses to the internet; it wants to build and operate the facilities that store and process the cloud software, enterprise tools, and artificial intelligence applications those businesses use. The South African telecoms company has created Africa Data Hub Holding Limited, a new company that will develop data centre capacity across Africa backed by an undisclosed United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based investment platform. What happened? MTN disclosed the partnership in its interim results for the six months ended June 30, 2026. Africa Data Hub will combine MTN’s footprint and local market knowledge with international funding and data centre expertise. MTN has identified South Africa and Nigeria as its priority markets for the data-centre and AI-infrastructure push. Nigeria has Africa’s largest mobile market, while South Africa is a key regional technology and enterprise market. MTN has already started laying the concrete. In 2025, MTN Nigeria opened the first phase of its 9MW Sifiso Dabengwa Data Centre in Lagos, Nigeria. That first phase delivered 4.5MW of capacity; the full facility is being built in two stages. In South Africa, MTN operates facilities in Centurion, Randburg, Cape Town, and Mtunzini. The Mtunzini site connects to 2Africa, a subsea cable system that carries internet traffic between Africa, Europe, and Asia. Explain like I’m new here: The new company is the latest step in a plan MTN began outlining with its 2025 full-year results, when it said its Digital Infrastructure business was preparing an AI-enabled data-centre network. The group then opened the first phase of the Lagos facility, and in March 2026, invested in ORAN Development Corporation (ODC), a US technology company developing systems that turn mobile-network sites into computing hubs.Africa Data Hub gives it a vehicle to sell more of the computing and storage happening at the other end. Between the lines: MTN is looking to turn its telecom footprint into a broader digital infrastructure business. The strategy goes beyond traditional data centres: in March, its Digital Infrastructure arm joined ODC’s $45 million Series A round, which is developing technology to turn mobile sites into distributed computing hubs. The new holding company and the ODC investment point in the same direction: MTN wants to capture the spending that follows Africa’s digitisation, not just the connectivity that enables it. Zoom out: Africa’s AI opportunity will depend on unglamorous infrastructure: reliable power, fibre, data centres, and enough computing capacity to keep applications running. MTN already has the customers, licences, and physical footprint. The next test is whether it can turn those advantages into a data centre business without losing focus on the telecom markets funding its expansion. Moonshot is back! Moonshot 2026 is coming! Join us at the National Theatre, Lagos on October 28 & 29 for two days of tech and innovation. Grab your early bird tickets now and get 15% off. Regulation Kenya’s gambling regulator can now collect the fees it was told to stop collecting Image Source: Tenor Kenya’s gambling industry has spent the past month in a regulatory limbo. The government said it needed new rules to clean up the sector, operators said some of those rules were too expensive, and the courts have been stuck in the middle. Now, the regulator has won a temporary round. What happened? Kenya’s High Court has ruled that the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Kenya (GRAK), the regulator that licences and supervises gambling businesses,
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MTN expects Nigeria rebound as airtime lending resumes
MTN Group expects its Nigerian business to regain momentum in the second half of 2026 after airtime lending resumed after a regulatory suspension in April. MTN said it cut its airtime lending base to about a quarter of its first-quarter run rate, weighing on revenue through April, May and June. The company is now rebuilding the service, with four vendors in place, and expects lending activity to recover through the second half. Airtime lending was a key source of MTN Nigeria’s fintech revenue, and its suspension cost the business about ₦50 billion ($37.1 million) in revenue in the first half of 2026. With the service returning, MTN expects growth to pick up. The telco reported 13% service revenue growth for the period, but group management said growth would have been in the high 20s if the airtime lending suspension and the effect of last year’s tariff increase were excluded. MTN suspended its airtime lending service in April after the Federal Competition & Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), Nigeria’s consumer watchdog, subjected the service to new licencing and consumer-protection requirements. In rebuilding the service, Ralph Mupita, MTN Group CEO, said the company expects the eligible customer base to gradually recover through the third and fourth quarters. “We received communications from the FCCPC, and we’re back on a recovery path with airtime advance,” Mupita said during MTN Group’s H1 results presentation on Monday. “So, in Q3 and Q4, we should start to see that build back up in terms of the whitelisting base, where we can extend airtime advance in Nigeria.” The recovery is key to MTN’s plans for Nigeria, one of its biggest growth markets. Despite the disruption, demand remains strong, with more people signing up and using more data. MTN Nigeria added about 7.5 million subscribers during the period while stepping up investment in network expansion, including mobile services, fixed wireless access and fibre. The company spent ₦620.5 billion ($460.8 million) on capital expenditure, excluding leases, with ₦390.3 billion ($289.8 million) spent in Q1 2026 alone—up 92.8% from the same period in 2025, according to its H1 2026 financial report released on July 30, 2026. But the airtime lending dispute also shows that telecom services in Nigeria are coming under closer regulatory scrutiny. Services such as MTN’s XtraTime, Globacom’s Borrow Me Credit, and Airtel’s Extra Credit allow customers to receive airtime or data on credit and repay when they next recharge. While traditionally treated as telecom value-added services, regulators have increasingly viewed such products through a consumer-credit lens, bringing them into a more complex regulatory environment. The disruption also shows how dependent telecom revenue can be on services that sit outside the traditional voice and data business. Airtime lending may appear small compared with core connectivity, but its impact on revenue becomes visible when millions of customers rely on it to stay connected between recharges. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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84 M&A deals worth $11.4 billion in disclosed value recorded so far in 2026
Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have doubled in Africa’s digital economy within the past year. As of August 17, 2026, TechCabal Insights has tracked 84 M&A deals worth an estimated $11.4 billion in disclosed value. While startups raised $1.44 billion in H1 2026, M&As have transformed from a rare exit route into a primary strategy for companies to scale, acquire banking licences, and stay afloat. 84 M&A deals logged across 2026 so far Between January 1 and August 17, 2026, company buyouts across Africa’s tech ecosystem exceeded the total numbers recorded in previous years. Led by a busy first quarter, 2026 has already recorded 84 deals, passing the 68 total deals seen across all four quarters of 2025. The uptick in deals, starting with 37 deals in Q1, shows companies are consolidating to combine their balance sheets, share licences, and survive in a tough market. Geographic footprint: where deals are happening Geographically, Southern Africa (24) and Northern Africa (18) lead regional M&A activity in 2026. At the country level, South Africa (22), Nigeria (12), and Egypt (12) account for over half of all target companies acquired as of August 17th. African tech companies are also looking outside the continent for growth. Local businesses acquired 8 targets outside Africa, including acquisitions in the UK (4), the US (1), France (1), Germany (1), and Canada (1), to build direct operations in international markets. Sector performance: Financial services leads with 27 deals Most acquisitions are happening in heavy sectors where getting licences, agent networks, and high daily customer transactions matter most. While over 12 sectors recorded buyout deals, Financial Services led with 27 deals, taking up roughly 32% of all activity. Disclosed deal values: most numbers remain hidden Even though the total number of M&A deals reached a record high, most companies keep their deal sizes secret. Of the 84 M&A deals tracked so far in 2026, the estimated total value of disclosed deals is roughly $11.4 billion as of August 17th, 2026. A few mega-deals account for the vast majority of this figure: MTN Group’s $6.2 billion proposed deal to buy 75% of IHS Towers. Vodacom Group’s $2.1 billion stake deal in Safaricom. Pepkor Holdings’ $1.29 billion (R21.3B) merger of Flash with Shop2Shop. Nedbank’s $850 million acquisition of Kenya’s NCBA Group. Beltone’s $197.6 million buyout of Baobab Group. e-Finance’s $99.8 million (EGP 5B) acquisition of Egyptian microfinance lender Tamweely. Fintechs and banks joining forces: who stays in charge? A major story in African tech is fintech companies and traditional banks coming together. Over the last 18 months, six major deals across five countries show two very different paths companies are taking: Fintechs buying banks (founders stay in charge): In Tanzania, Selcom acquired 65% of Access Microfinance Bank. In Kenya, Moniepoint acquired 78% of Sumac Microfinance Bank. In Nigeria, Flutterwave secured its own microfinance banking licence from the Central Bank. In Senegal, Wave set up Wave Bank Africa with $30.5 million in capital. In all these deals, the fintech founders stayed in control and kept running the business their way. Banks buying fintechs (banks take control): On the other hand, Nedbank acquired South African fintech iKhokha completely for $92.4 million (R1.65B), and Capitec acquired Walletdoc for up to R400M. In these deals, the traditional bank assumes full authority over product roadmaps, board seats, executive management, and strategic directions. The core insight here is not simply whether a fintech acquires a banking licence, but whether the founders retain operational control after the deal closes. Listing on foreign stock markets: why big fintechs are looking abroad Beyond private buyouts, top African fintechs are preparing to sell shares on public stock markets. Two of the biggest payment platforms are planning to list abroad: OPay is preparing for a $4 billion listing in the US, while PalmPay is looking at a $200 million listing in Hong Kong at a $1 billion+ valuation. While some advocate for local or dual listings, allowing African retail investors to trade shares in domestic markets alongside global ones, the decision to list primary shares abroad comes down to capital depth, valuation multiples, and currency mechanics. Foreign exchanges in New York and Hong Kong offer deeper pools of growth equity, higher valuation multiples, and dollar-denominated liquidity that large-scale cross-border expansion demands. For local stock exchanges in Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg to attract primary or dual listings from tech giants, they must deepen institutional liquidity, streamline multi-exchange compliance, and reduce foreign exchange repatriation risks for investors.
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Africa’s data sovereignty push is reshaping the AI race, and AWS wants in
From Nigeria to Kenya and South Africa, regulators are introducing rules requiring certain categories of sensitive information to remain within national borders or imposing stricter conditions on their transfer abroad. The push reflects a broader concern: as data becomes increasingly valuable to artificial intelligence, governments want greater control over the information generated by their citizens, businesses and public institutions. For global cloud providers, that creates a difficult market to navigate. AI systems need access to large volumes of data to be useful, but the same data is increasingly subject to rules about where it can be stored, processed and accessed. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is betting that it can resolve that tension, giving African organisations access to AI and global cloud infrastructure while allowing them to retain control over sensitive data. The strategy is becoming central to AWS’s pitch to African enterprises. Rather than treating data sovereignty as a barrier to cloud adoption, the company is presenting it as something that can be built into cloud service architecture. But localisation comes with costs. Keeping data in-country can reduce latency to below 15 milliseconds, which is valuable for real-time services such as banking and payments. Yet local hosting can also be more expensive, particularly in markets where unreliable power supplies force data centres to rely on costly backup generation. Companies facing strict localisation rules may also need hybrid setups that keep sensitive data locally while accessing AI tools and other services from infrastructure abroad, adding to their infrastructure and licensing costs. The complexity increases for businesses operating across Africa’s 54 markets. Different rules under Nigeria’s NDPA, South Africa’s POPIA and Kenya’s Data Protection Act can require companies to manage separate compliance and risk requirements in each market. Using sovereign cloud products such as AWS Outposts or Azure Local can also increase reliance on the platforms and APIs of major cloud providers. At the AWS Summit in Johannesburg on August 19, Jonathan Allen, AWS executive in residence, said the company is focused on complying with the laws of the more than 100 countries where it operates and adapting its infrastructure to meet local requirements. “We’re always focused on complying with the laws of the countries in which we operate,” Allen said. That may sound like a straightforward commitment to regulation, but it reflects a broader shift in the cloud market. Governments are no longer asking only whether cloud providers can secure their data; they increasingly want control over where data is stored, who can access it, which laws apply, and how it is governed. Nigeria is one of the clearest examples. The Central Bank of Nigeria has introduced data-localisation and market-oversight requirements for the payments sector, putting greater pressure on financial institutions to demonstrate control over how sensitive data is stored and managed. The same push is taking shape across other major African markets, although the rules vary. South Africa has called for greater local control over strategic government and public-service data through its National Policy on Data and Cloud, while POPIA places conditions on the cross-border transfer of personal information. Kenya has adopted a more targeted approach, requiring certain sensitive data, including civil-registration records, to be processed or stored locally and imposing safeguards on cross-border transfers. Rwanda has gone further in critical sectors, with localisation requirements covering sensitive financial, payment and telecommunications data. Together, these policies point to a broader shift: African governments increasingly see data as strategic infrastructure rather than simply a business asset, and are seeking greater control over how it is stored, processed and transferred. That is making data sovereignty an increasingly important part of the operating environment for technology companies on the continent. For AWS, the response is what it calls a “sovereign-by-design” approach. The company says its cloud infrastructure gives customers greater control over where their data is stored and processed, how it is encrypted, and who can access sensitive information. AWS’s infrastructure includes Local Zones and Outposts, while its Nitro System provides hardware-based isolation for workloads running on Amazon EC2. Customers can also use customer-managed encryption keys, including options that keep cryptographic material outside AWS’s control. The significance is not simply that AWS has added more security features. It is that the company is trying to separate using global cloud infrastructure from giving up control of data. That distinction matters as AI becomes embedded in everyday business operations. Fred Kitunga, chief information officer at Kenya Airways, is seeing that shift firsthand. The airline is increasingly looking at AI and data not as isolated IT projects but as tools for making better business decisions — from determining flight profitability to understanding customers and responding to cybersecurity threats. “We are looking at how we can transform the business in terms of the strategic intent,” Kitunga told TechCabal on the sidelines of the AWS Summit. “We don’t look at what technologies we can deploy. It’s what business problems are then resolved.” That approach requires access to reliable organisational data. But Kenya Airways operates across borders, with customers and operations spanning multiple jurisdictions. Kitunga said the airline therefore relies on international data protection standards while maintaining a board-level policy governing data and AI. “We leverage more on GDPR global standards that are there,” he said. His comments illustrate why Africa’s sovereignty debate is more complex than simply demanding that all data remain within national borders. For a multinational company, the challenge is often not to keep every piece of information physically within one country. It is to know which data is subject to which rules and to have enough technical and organisational controls to demonstrate compliance. That is the gap AWS says it wants to fill. The company wants enterprises to believe they can use the computing power and AI capabilities of a global cloud provider while retaining control over sensitive workloads. In AWS’s model, sovereignty becomes a question of architecture and governance rather than simply geography. But that proposition will face growing scrutiny. As AI systems become more powerful, the data they consume becomes more strategically important.
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Askya wants to build ‘tech Dangotes’ starting with 10 African AI startups
Askya Investment Partners is opening applications for a six-week programme for African AI startups, with a minimum commitment of $200,000 to at least one participant. Ten companies will take part, and none of them has to pay cash or give up equity to participate. Founded in 2024 by Babacar Seck, the firm’s pitch rests heavily on his track record, as Seck spent years at AXA as an advisor to the chairman and chief executive before becoming a founding member of Proparco’s $300 million venture capital programme and later chief executive of Digital Africa. Across those roles, he backed nearly 20 startups, including Moniepoint, Jumia, GoMyCode and Complete Farmer, and was the first generation of institutional venture capital fund managers on the continent. By the firm’s account, those investments returned more than $120 million in profits to investors, including one New York Stock Exchange listing. He has also chaired a Smart Africa AI council investment working group, developing a continental AI investment strategy. Seck is deliberate about how he describes the programme. It is not an accelerator, he says, because accelerators are built around fundraising. They teach founders to pitch, polish their deck, and end with a demo day that is effectively a pitching day, treating the fundraise as the outcome. Askya’s programme starts from a different diagnosis. Many African companies find real demand for their products but still struggle to scale because the fundamentals underneath them are weak—governance, hiring, and technology. That, Seck argues, is rarely a problem of founder intelligence or integrity. It is a problem of exposure. The programme will therefore pair founders with operators and builders who can coach them, alongside masterclasses covering go-to-market strategy, distribution, pricing, governance, and technology. The second problem Askya is trying to solve is disconnection. Seck describes an ecosystem whose parts do not talk to each other. Data centres chase customers while everyone insists Africa needs more data centres. Global cloud providers quietly report that some of their biggest African customers are startups, a few spending upwards of $30 million a year. Corporates and governments say they want to work with African startups but do not know which ones are good. Universities train AI engineers who take jobs abroad, because too few companies on the continent operate at the scale needed to keep them. Askya will bring telcos, banks, and technology companies into the programme to put their real problems in front of founders. It is also partnering with Deep Learning Indaba to connect participating companies to the wider African AI community. On what Askya is actually looking for, Seck is equally specific. Companies must be African-founded and based on the continent, with full-time founders, a working product, and their first customers. They cannot be at the idea stage, but Askya is not demanding millions in revenue either. The firm is open to companies up to the pre-Series A stage. Beyond those basics, Seck says there are three tests. Is the company solving a real problem or building a solution in search of one? Is its product meaningfully better than the alternatives, given what African customers actually value? And does the team have what it takes to build it? The fourth criterion — the one Seck returns to most often — is commitment. Askya is not looking for founders chasing a quick investment and exit. Internally, the firm calls the kind of companies it wants to build “tech Dangotes”: generational businesses capable of lasting decades. As Seck puts it, building a great business does not take five years. It takes seven, 10, or 15. This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity. What does your ideal African AI startup look like? Babacar Seck: When we talk about why AI is interesting to us, the fundamental reason is that AI is a productivity enhancement tool. That is really the core of it. Everything we see and like derives from that, because if you look at the impact of AI in the world today, where it is impactful, it is driving up productivity and effectiveness. We think about it as a tool that can help us solve our problems in energy, healthcare, industrialisation, economic inclusion, and other sectors. If we zoom in on where we have seen exciting startups, I would separate them into two blocks. Internally we call the first one the AI stack — the different layers of the AI value chain. One very exciting area is voice AI in African languages. You have probably seen many startups operating in that space. They have not fully cracked it yet, but think about it: today in Africa, most people do not speak English, French, or Portuguese at home. They speak their mother tongue, the language they are more comfortable in. The data in South Africa shows 80% do not speak English at home, which surprised many people, including us. The minute you have an application — and several are being developed — that lets companies interact with their customers in the customer’s own language, you are bridging a divide. Not only in company-to-customer interactions, but also in government-to-citizen ones. We are starting to see this with NGOs using WhatsApp voice messages in African languages to reach people who are often not literate and who live in rural areas where English or French education is less developed. It is a tool with the opportunity to bridge that divide. The other block we call AI for the real economy. This is the pure productivity play. Everywhere you have structured data at scale, you can build innovative small AI models that enhance performance. This is very exciting in the African context, because we are digitising in the age of AI. We are creating structured pools of data at the same time as we are applying AI to them. It creates a leapfrog effect, because you are building an economic moat much faster as you scale. Think about the energy space. We see B2B companies in Nigeria that help you optimise your energy installation.
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👨🏿🚀TechCabal Daily – Cell C, plan C
In partnership with Lire en Français اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية Good morning. Welcome to another week. The English Premier League has kicked off. While it wasn’t the best start to the campaign, we (Man United) still had it better than a certain fanbase that outspent us—embarrassing, but yes, I want to take things to a new low. All protests against this logic will fall on deaf ears. In Silicon Valley, tech bros are fighting about whose AI research model is better; the folks at Inherent say theirs is. Who knows? Anthropic could just be cooling off on research to convince investors that it’s not trying to sell them a bubble ahead of its public listing. Keep scrolling to see what we’ve got for you today in African tech. —Emmanuel Become smarter about tech and commerce in Francophone Africa, and the policies shaping them. Read previous editions here first and subscribe below. Subscribe Cell C in talks with Starlink, Amazon Leo SA’s Gauteng wants to know who gig drivers are IN Groupe eyes expansive role in Kenya Malawi mulls tax relief for smartphones, Internet World Wide Web 3 Job Openings Telecoms Cell C wants Starlink and Amazon Leo in its network Image Source: Tenor Cell C, the South African mobile operator, is borrowing infrastructure to connect its customers to the Internet. Now, it wants to add space to the mix. What happened? Jorge Mendes, Cell C’s chief executive officer, said the company is in talks with satellite Internet service providers (ISPs) Starlink and Amazon Leo about reselling their broadband services to its customers and potentially offering direct-to-device connectivity. What would this mean? If this happens, Cell C subscribers could possibly connect to the Internet in two ways: through terrestrial networks, such as mobile towers, or satellite networks that beam connectivity from space. Cell C already relies on MTN and Vodacom’s network infrastructure instead of operating its own. The operator could use satellite broadband to reach places where building fibre or mobile towers is expensive, or resell satellite Internet to customers who need connectivity outside its traditional coverage. The space race is getting crowded: The move comes shortly after Herotel, a South African ISP, signed a distribution deal with Amazon Leo. Herotel said it plans to sell Amazon Leo’s satellite service under the ‘Evry’ brand from 2027. The deal, however, is non-exclusive, so other companies can also partner with Amazon. Traditional telecom companies have been eyeing partnerships with satellite Internet firms to extend broadband reach, with potentially lower capital expenditure—compared to fibre—and arguably better Internet access. Starlink reached a similar agreement in the Democratic Republic of Congo and launched in August. Despite talks with Cell C on a potential collaboration, Elon Musk-owned Starlink still hasn’t secured an operating licence in South Africa—its attempt marred by local rules keeping it out and disagreements that have turned into a political fight. South Africa’s connectivity market is heating up: MTN and Vodacom, South Africa’s two largest telecom firms, are also testing their own satellite-to-phone services through partnerships with US firm Lynk Global and AST Spacemobile, although neither has launched commercially. The coming months could get very interesting, as more players look to space for the next way to keep South Africans connected. Every business owner needs to watch this. The business questions you Google, answered by experts. Watch for free. Ride-hailing South African province Gauteng wants to know who your Uber, Bolt, or Wanatu driver is Image Source: Tenor South Africa’s e-hailing rules are moving from the app store to the government database. Gauteng, the smallest yet wealthiest province in South Africa, wants every e-hailing driver in the province to register on its public transport system—and foreign drivers will have to identify themselves as such. What happened? Gauteng’s Department of Transport is asking ride-hailing operators, including Uber, Bolt, Wanatu (a local operator), and inDrive, to register their drivers on the Gauteng Integrated Public Transport Administration System (GIPTAS). The system stores information on public transport operators, routes, licences, and conflicts. Drivers will submit details including their Professional Driving Permit, vehicle registration, and ID number. Foreign drivers without South African ID numbers can use a Traffic Register Number, a profile created on the national road-traffic system for people without the country’s 13-digit ID. State of play: The registration drive follows South Africa’s amended National Land Transport Amendment Act, passed in 2025, which formally brought e-hailing into the country’s public transport system. The wider rules mandated ride-hailing companies, local and foreign, to secure e-hailing licences, brand their vehicles, and install panic buttons for passenger safety. However, Gauteng hasn’t set a specific deadline for ride-hailing companies and drivers to comply. Explain like I’m new here: Gauteng is the inland province at the heart of South Africa’s economic engine. It includes Johannesburg, the country’s main financial and industrial centre, and Pretoria, the administrative capital. So this is not a small-town transport experiment: it is happening in the province where a huge share of the country’s business, commuting, and airport traffic converges. Between the lines: Gauteng is also the country’s biggest ride-hailing battleground. Uber held an estimated 60–65% of Johannesburg’s market in 2025, with Bolt taking most of the remainder, according to Bobby Ramagwede, chief executive officer of the country’s Automobile Association. That makes the province a high-stakes test of whether South Africa can bring app-based transport into the same regulatory net as taxis and buses without making it harder for drivers to earn a living—or for passengers to find a ride. Zoom out: The government says it needs a clear record of who is operating on its roads; however, ride-hailing platforms are still working through the practicalities of feeding driver data into a new system. For passengers, registration could offer some reassurance, creating a nationally enforceable way to track down wrongdoers in cases of incidents, a possible sigh of relief in South Africa’s torrid history of ride-hailing violence. Moonshot is back! Moonshot 2026 is coming! Join us at the National Theatre, Lagos on October 28 & 29 for two
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The Next Wave: Are Kenyan startups not bootstrapping enough?
Cet article est aussi disponible en français <!– In partnership with –> First published on August 23, 2026 If you start a business in a normal environment, you face a very simple but brutal problem: you must convince people to give you more money for your product than it costs you to provide it. If you fail, you run out of money and stop being a business. We call this bootstrapping, but it’s really just doing business. But if you start a business in an environment suddenly flooded with foreign venture capital, your problem changes. Your job now includes convincing customers to pay for your product now, and doing the same for investors to fund your runway later. Over the last few years, the Kenyan tech ecosystem got very good at the second job, while systematically forgetting how to do the first. Here is a slightly uncomfortable theory about what happened to Kenyan tech founders; they stopped bootstrapping not because they suddenly lost their drive, but because a localised glut of capital made bootstrapping economically irrational. Continuous funding replaced the constraints of early-stage survival, stripping the ecosystem of the hunger, angst and resourcefulness needed to digitise a frontier market. The visceral fear of missing payroll gave way to the bureaucratic anxiety of managing a burn rate. Investors are now quietly realising that the capital meant to empower Kenyan founders ended up domesticating them and turning scrappy entrepreneurs into highly paid managers of fundamentally unprofitable logistics subsidies. Next Wave continues after this ad. Founders. Investors. Policymakers. Enterprise leaders. Moonshot 2026 brings together the people shaping Africa’s technology ecosystem across AI, commerce, climate, enterprise, and culture. Spotlight your brand today. Secure Your Spot! The tragedy of the well-funded pivot If you are a venture capitalist with a mandate to deploy capital in East Africa, you want to fund scalable technology. If you are a Kenyan consumer, you want cheap consumer goods. For a brief, glorious period, the industry decided that the solution to both desires was to give tech founders tens of millions of dollars to subsidise the delivery of those goods. The structural reality of rural and informal delivery in East Africa is that it is extraordinarily expensive, highly fragmented and margin-poor. But when a startup has $20 million, it doesn’t need to prove that a customer will pay a profitable margin today. It only needs to prove top-line growth to the next series investor. You can defer the reality of unit economics for a very long time if your charts point up and to the right. To see how this plays out when the music stops, you only need to look at the recent mortality rate of Kenya’s most celebrated disruptors: Copia Global: This rural e-commerce platform raised $123 million across eight funding rounds. The business model was, essentially, to exchange global venture capital for the privilege of subsidising the delivery of consumer goods to remote populations. When the macroeconomic environment shifted and the company could no longer attract capital to maintain its high-burn operations, it collapsed into administration under KPMG, jeopardising over 1,000 jobs. Sendy: Targeting to streamline informal supply chains, Sendy raised $20 million from impact investors. Over five years, the company executed multiple expensive pivots—from household package delivery to long-haul B2B logistics—before simply running out of cash to subsidise its operations and shutting down. Twiga Foods: Twiga raised massive amounts of capital on the premise of organising smallholder farmers, only to realise that working with small farmers is fundamentally unprofitable. They pivoted to large farms, fired their in-house sales team, shifted to commission agents, fired those agents for underperformance, and scrapped their in-house logistics. Lipa Later: A celebrated Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) fintech that was placed under administration in March 2025, highlighting the fatal mismatch between the high cost of capital and local consumer default realities. Kune Foods: Raised over $1 million for a food delivery model that solved a non-existent problem and fundamentally clashed with local consumer habits, burning through its runway before shutting down. The Kenyan tech ecosystem absorbed $638 million in 2024 and an astounding $984 million in 2025. Yet, the return profile looks increasingly bleak. Startup shutdowns across Africa jumped 50% in 2025, erasing $52 million in investor capital. Lost hunger Investors are openly noting that the scrappy, default-alive energy that characterised early Kenyan tech has evaporated. There are specific reasons why this hunger dissipated, and they are entirely rational responses to the incentive structures created by venture capital: Bootstrapping aligns a founder’s survival directly with the customer’s willingness to pay. Venture capital aligns the founder’s survival with the investor’s willingness to fund. The normalisation of high founder salaries at the pre-seed stages has completely altered the risk-reward calculus. When a founder is drawing a comfortable corporate salary to run an unprofitable business, the existential dread that forces true innovation disappears. Driven by the need to attract global capital, founders prioritised building businesses that pattern-match with Silicon Valley trends rather than addressing local realities. Deploying an app that introduces QR code menus to a roadside food vendor (a kibanda) looks highly innovative to a foreign capital allocator, but it adds zero tangible value to a price-sensitive local consumer base. Access to excessive early capital encourages founders to skip the crucial “no-code” validation phases, defaulting immediately to aggressive scaling and large tech teams. This results in massive burn rates and bloated overheads, complete with lavish company offsites. Capital deployment is often so inefficient that cynical local market observers have begun likening heavily funded ventures to fraudulent money conduits. The persistent assumption that the sheer scale of the Kenyan informal sector will eventually fix negative margins has proven fatal. Instead of estimating realistic customer acquisition costs against the local demographic’s actual purchasing power, founders relied on continuous funding simply to maintain daily operations. The mathematics of customer acquisition costing more than the customer’s lifetime value cannot be outrun forever, even in an emerging market. The market correction currently tearing through Nairobi is painful, but structurally necessary.
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What to expect from the Samsung Galaxy event on August 27
Table of contents When is the Samsung Galaxy event? How to watch the Samsung Galaxy event What will Samsung announce at the event? Samsung Galaxy S26 FE expected specs Could Samsung also announce the Galaxy Tab S12? What Samsung has confirmed so far Samsung is holding a Galaxy Event on August 27, 2026. The company has not named the phone yet, but everything points to the Galaxy S26 FE. Samsung says the event will bring the core Galaxy S26 experience, from camera to AI, to a wider audience. This guide covers the event time in Nigeria, how to watch it, what the Galaxy S26 FE is expected to offer, and how it compares to the Galaxy S25 FE. You will also find the price rumours and what else could show up at the event. When is the Samsung Galaxy event? Samsung confirmed the date as August 27, 2026. The event starts at 9:00 p.m. in South Korea. Here is what that means in different regions: South Korea: 9:00 p.m. KST, August 27 Nigeria: 1:00 p.m. WAT, August 27 United States (Eastern): 8:00 a.m. EDT, August 27 United Kingdom: 1:00 p.m. BST, August 27 If you are in Nigeria, mark your calendar for 1 p.m. on August 27. How to watch the Samsung Galaxy event Samsung will stream the event live on Samsung.com and on its official YouTube channel. You do not need a ticket or an invite. Just log on at the time above and watch. What will Samsung announce at the event? Samsung’s official invite does not name a phone. It only says the event will introduce the newest addition to the Galaxy S26 family, and that the device will bring core Galaxy S26 experiences in camera and AI, along with the latest One UI. That phone is almost certainly the Galaxy S26 FE. Samsung already mentioned a new S26 FE during its July earnings call, and leaked certification filings, benchmark listings, and marketing images all point to the same device. Samsung Galaxy S26 FE expected specs 1. Design and display: Leaks suggest the S26 FE will keep a familiar look but carry the newer S26 design language. Expect: A 6.7-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate Gorilla Glass Victus+ protection and an aluminium frame IP68 water and dust resistance Colours in Blueberry, Pistachio, and Graphite 2. Performance and software: The processor is where this phone should show its biggest change. Leaks and a benchmark listing point to Samsung’s own Exynos 2500 chip, a jump from the Exynos 2400 in the S25 FE. Exynos 2500 chipset, based on leaks and a benchmark listing 8GB RAM, with storage options at 128GB and 256GB Android 17 with One UI 9 out of the box Up to seven years of OS updates, based on leaked marketing material 3. Camera and Galaxy AI: The camera numbers look almost unchanged from the S25 FE. Leaks point to: 50MP main camera 12MP ultrawide camera 8MP telephoto camera with 3x zoom 12MP front camera Samsung has already named the camera and AI as the two big themes for this event. Expect more focus on software features like Circle to Search, Now Brief, and Bixby than on new camera hardware. 4. Battery and charging: 4,900mAh battery 45W wired charging, supported by certification filings Wireless charging, though the speed is not yet known A leaked claim of around 50 hours of typical use, still unverified 5. Cost: Samsung has not announced a price yet. A French retail leak from Dealabs points to price increases over the S25 FE: Could Samsung also announce the Galaxy Tab S12? Samsung already confirmed the Galaxy Tab S12 as a product for the second half of 2026, but it has not linked the tablet to this event. The August 27 invite only mentions a new Galaxy S26 phone, and separate reports suggest the Tab S12 could launch in October instead. Treat the Tab S12 as a possible surprise, not a sure thing at this event. What Samsung has confirmed so far Confirmed: The event is on August 27, 2026, streamed on Samsung.com and YouTube A new Galaxy S26 family phone will be announced Camera, Galaxy AI, and One UI will be central to the event The Galaxy Tab S12 is a real, upcoming Samsung product, just not confirmed for this event Still unconfirmed: The Galaxy S26 FE name itself Final specs, storage options, and colours Price in any market, including Nigeria Preorder and sale dates outside the France leak Samsung is expected to settle most of these questions live on August 27. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Samsung Galaxy S26 FE: Release date, price and specs
Table of contents When is the Galaxy S26 FE coming out Samsung Galaxy S26 FE price Samsung Galaxy S26 FE price in Nigeria Samsung Galaxy S26 FE specs Camera, battery and charging Samsung Galaxy S26 FE vs Galaxy S25 FE Should you wait for the Galaxy S26 FE? What we still don’t know Samsung is set to unveil a new Galaxy S26 series device on August 27, 2026, and everything points to this being the Galaxy S26 FE. The company hasn’t used that name yet, but leaked benchmarks, regulatory filings, and marketing materials tell a fairly complete story about the phone before Samsung says a word. Here is what you need to know about the release date, price, specs and how it stacks up against the Galaxy S25 FE. When is the Galaxy S26 FE coming out Samsung has confirmed a Galaxy Event for August 27, 2026, at 9 p.m. Korea Standard Time. That works out to 1 p.m. in Nigeria. Samsung’s invite promises a new addition to the Galaxy S26 family, with a focus on camera experiences, AI and the latest version of One UI. The evidence linking this device to the Galaxy S26 FE is strong, even though Samsung has not put a name on it yet: Google Play Console listings show Galaxy S26 FE models with codes like SM-S741B, SM-S741N, SM-S741U and SM-S741W A Geekbench listing for SM-S741B shows Android 17 and Samsung’s own s5e9955 chip, and FCC filings tied to the device confirm Samsung’s cellular hardware alongside Qualcomm’s wireless chip Treat August 27 as the announcement date, not the sale date. Samsung has not confirmed when the phone goes on sale. Reports point to the first week of September 2026, and the Galaxy S25 FE went on sale on September 4, 2025, so a similar window is likely again. Nigeria’s launch date is even less clear. Samsung has run FE launch promotions in Nigeria before, including for the S23 FE in October 2023 and the S24 FE in October 2024. That history is a good sign, but it doesn’t guarantee the S26 FE arrives here on the same day as in Europe or the US. Samsung Galaxy S26 FE price The clearest price signal so far comes from a leak in France. Dealabs reported the following prices, and both SamMobile and 9to5Google have since cited the same figures. Samsung has not confirmed any of these numbers, and it has not announced a price for any other market. Those figures are €50, €90 and €170 higher than the equivalent Galaxy S25 FE prices. A $799 figure has shown up in some coverage, but that number comes from converting the European price rather than an actual US leak, so treat it as a guess and not a confirmed price. Samsung kept the Galaxy S24 FE and Galaxy S25 FE at $649.99 in the US at launch, which gives you a sense of where the US price could land if Samsung holds the line this year. Samsung Galaxy S26 FE price in Nigeria An official Nigeria price does not exist yet, and converting the French price straight to naira would give you a misleading number. Nigerian pricing depends on the exchange rate, import costs, VAT and Samsung’s own local pricing decisions, so what follows is a working estimate rather than a leak. Using the CBN’s exchange rate of ₦1,347.63 to the dollar, Nigeria’s 7.5% VAT rate and current Samsung retail prices in Nigeria as reference points, here is a rough model based on three possible US starting prices: Based on this, our working estimate for the base 128GB Galaxy S26 FE in Nigeria sits between ₦1.05 million and ₦1.20 million. A 256GB model could land between ₦1.18 million and ₦1.35 million if Samsung applies the same storage price jump seen in the French leak. Both ranges are estimates until Samsung West Africa confirms official pricing. Samsung Galaxy S26 FE specs Samsung has not published a spec sheet for the phone, but leaked marketing material, Google Play Console data, Geekbench results and FCC filings agree on most of the details below. Storage is one area with mixed signals. One detailed leak lists only 128GB and 256GB, while pricing leaks and newer reports mention a 512GB option too. Treat 512GB as possible, not certain, until Samsung confirms it. Colour names have also shifted between reports. Earlier leaks used names like Aqua Green and Blue/Purple. The newest and most complete render leak names three colours, Blueberry, Pistachio and Graphite, and this is the version most likely to match what Samsung eventually announces. Camera, battery and charging On paper, the camera setup looks unchanged from last year. Leaks point to the same 50MP main sensor and 8MP telephoto sensor used in the Galaxy S25 FE, so any improvement will likely come from software, Galaxy AI, and image processing rather than new hardware. That fits Samsung’s own teaser language, which promises upgrades “from camera to AI.” Battery capacity also stays flat at 4,900mAh, the same figure as the Galaxy S25 FE. What stands out is the battery life rating. European energy labels show a 50-hour rating with an A energy grade, compared with 42.5 hours and a B grade for the Galaxy S25 FE. That is a meaningful jump in efficiency without a bigger battery. There is a trade-off too. The same energy labels reportedly rate the battery for 1,200 full charge cycles before it drops below its rated capacity, down from 2,000 cycles on the Galaxy S25 FE. Some reports link the improved efficiency to a silicon-carbon battery, but Samsung has not said what changed, so treat that claim as a rumour for now. Wired charging stays at 45W, the same speed as the Galaxy S25 FE. FCC filings confirm the phone supports reverse wireless charging, though the maximum wireless charging speed is still unknown. Samsung Galaxy S26 FE vs Galaxy S25 FE Most of the changes sit under the hood. The processor upgrade and the better battery efficiency rating are the
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He started Bitoshi as a student with an $11.12 allowance. Now it has 60,000 users
As a first-year Computer Science student at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Timilehin Zubair wanted to become financially independent. His parents gave him ₦15,000 ($11.12) a month, which was supposed to cover his expenses as he adjusted to living away from home. But Zubair could spend the money within two weeks. He began looking for ways to earn his own income. His first attempt was an Instagram blog, where he reposted pictures from other accounts and tried to build an audience. When that failed to gain traction, he moved into vector art, teaching himself Photoshop and spending hours drawing people. He attracted some attention, but the commissions he expected never came. Graphic design was one of his first experiments that actually made money. Zubair began designing for brands and used some of his earnings to advertise his services. In his second year, a roommate asked him to design a flyer for a crypto business he was starting. The design job became Zubair’s introduction to crypto. “That was not the first time I was hearing about crypto,” he told TechCabal in an interview. “This time around, I was very interested in knowing more about it. So, I told him to put me on and give me more information about the business.” By the time he finished the design, Zubair had started trading crypto himself. He bought cryptocurrency from people at one price and sold it at a higher price, keeping the difference. His graphic-design earnings helped him advertise the business, while customers began contacting him on WhatsApp to buy and sell crypto. As the business grew, Zubair realised that he could not handle every transaction manually. If he wanted to serve more customers, he needed to automate the process and build a product. It took a failed attempt to hire an outside developer, and the discovery that one of his own coursemates could build software, the WhatsApp hustle to become Bitoshi, the crypto startup Zubair founded in 2020. The company allows users to send cryptocurrency to a wallet address and receive its naira equivalent in their bank accounts. The name Bitoshi combines “Bit”, from Bitcoin, and “oshi”, from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator or creators of Bitcoin. Bitoshi entered a Nigerian crypto market that was growing rapidly but operating under a difficult banking environment. In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) directed banks and other financial institutions to close accounts belonging to crypto businesses. It warned regulated institutions against dealing in crypto-related transactions. By 2026, Nigerians had transacted an estimated $96 billion worth of crypto, making the country one of Africa’s largest crypto markets. For Bitoshi, the opportunity was also the challenge: how do you build a crypto business when the banking infrastructure needed to move customers’ money is effectively off-limits? Day 1: Turning the WhatsApp hustle into a product Ask Zubair when Bitoshi started, and he will not point to the WhatsApp side hustle. In his telling, that was simply a way to make money he badly needed. Day 1, as he counts it, was the moment he decided to turn the hustle into a company. On WhatsApp, Zubair manually matched crypto buyers and sellers and tracked payments himself. Customers would tell him they wanted to sell Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. He would give them a rate; they would send the crypto to his wallet, and he would transfer the naira equivalent to their bank account. It worked when the business was small. But Zubair knew he could not keep doing every transaction himself as the customer base grew. “I could not scale to 100 customers a day because it was not humanly possible,” he said. Scaling meant getting off WhatsApp and building an actual product. The answer came in the form of Leon, a fellow FUTA student Zubair had known since his first year but did not realise was a developer. The first version of Bitoshi was a simple website that generated a wallet address for each user, allowed them to send cryptocurrency to it and paid the naira equivalent into their bank account. In effect, it was a website version of what Zubair had been doing manually on WhatsApp. For the first few months, it was just the two of them. They were students, working remotely and learning as they went. “We had no marketing team in the early stage. We did zero marketing,” Zubair said. “I was just telling the audience I already had about this product, and they all seemed to like it and started telling their friends about it.” Because Bitoshi launched during the crypto ban, Zubair built Bitoshi assuming it would never get a bank partnership, “We built the product with the mindset that we were going to handle these transactions ourselves,” he said. To make that possible, Bitoshi built a vendor-dispatch system. Withdrawal requests were routed by an algorithm to a queue of vendors. A transaction would go to the first vendor and move to the next if it was not picked up within a set time, until an available vendor accepted it. That vendor would send the money from their own bank account to the customer’s account and earn a commission for processing the transaction. According to Zubair, the system gave the company an advantage over crypto platforms that relied on conventional peer-to-peer (P2P)transactions, where users had to find and transact with individual buyers or sellers. The workaround came with its own problems. Zubair said hackers found ways to exploit the platform, while other users created multiple accounts with fake identities to farm referral bonuses. “We learned on the job. We made a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of losses, because we didn’t fully understand what it meant to build in a financial market,” Zubair says. “It was very messy. But everything that happened, every obstacle we came across, we were able to break through and proceed.” Day 500: From holding crypto to spending it Bitoshi had figured out how to make it easier for
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