Canal Minus

Happy midweek. ☀️️

The biggest news in the global tech industry yesterday was obviously Mastercard’s announcement to buy BVNK, the UK-headquartered stablecoin neobank founded by South Africans, for $1.8 billion. I couldn’t help but notice the amount was conveniently less than Coinbase’s failed $2 billion bid in 2025. Mastercard said the deal value includes a $300 million fee for “contingent payments,” and it’s anyone’s guess what that cryptic message means.

It’s not surprising that Mastercard swooped in to bid for BVNK. This company has built rails for businesses to hold, move, and settle funds using stablecoins alongside traditional bank infrastructure. It gives Mastercard a ready-made bridge between card networks and on-chain dollar payments. And with that, it’s officially stablecoin season again. 

In other news, we’re one edition away from a milestone tenth episode of Headlines by TechCabal, our talk show where we decode everything tech and policy in Africa. We’re still talking to potential sponsors, so if you’d love to feature your brand, now's your moment. Fill out this form to speak with the amazing humans on our partnerships team.

If you haven’t watched episode 9, race with the speed of Hermes and watch it here.

Let's dive in.

—Emmanuel

You must be thinking: Canal+ is in the news again? Well, that's because the French media giant has been moving like a company with a tight deadline to make it work or pack up. 

This time, Canal+ is backing a voluntary severance programme for support roles at MultiChoice and planning a restructuring at IRDETO, the pay-TV group’s technology and cybersecurity arm. “Voluntary severance” here means employees are being offered an exit package they can opt into, rather than being pushed out through outright retrenchments.

The company has not disclosed the number of roles it plans to cut, but MultiChoice has an estimated 6,900 permanent employees across Africa.

What makes this tricky is that MultiChoice, as a classic pay-TV operator, did many of the textbook things right. It built local content, tried streaming, and fought piracy, but still ran into a wall of macro headwinds, dollar content costs, and global streamers with deeper pockets.

Yet, Canal+ is pushing ahead with a business rejig in hopes of stopping the financial hemorrhages at MultiChoice, while also pledging to back local content production with $115 million in capital—nothing new, the discontinued Showmax tried to use the same playbook. Yet, the human cost is that some of the people who built the old machine will not be around to see what the new one becomes. 

But the poser here is whether this flurry of resuscitation attempts will actually translate into a healthier business in a few years; Canal+ is arguably the busiest media company operating in Africa right now, and if you blink, you risk missing a decade’s worth of its critical operational decisions.

MTN’s tagline is no longer ‘everywhere you go,’ but with its recent fibre broadband push into 30 million African homes, it still wants you to remember that promise. Africa’s largest telecoms operator now says one of its biggest growth priorities over the next five years will not come from selling more mobile SIM cards, but turning homes and small businesses into fixed broadband customers, using a mix of fibre and fixed wireless.

State of play: It’s a shift from how African telcos have invested for most of the last three decades, when the priority was building mobile coverage so people could get online through their phones. CEO Ralph Mupita told investors that as work, school, and entertainment move online, “homes will account for a predominant share of digital workloads,” and MTN wants to be the one piping that traffic. 

The numbers back that ambition: MTN plans to connect 20–30 million homes across its markets, and MTN Nigeria, the group’s subsidiary, invested about ₦1 trillion ($737 million) in fibre and added over 281,000 home users in one quarter of 2025.

Between the lines: MTN is also frank that this is about fixing a usage gap. Its customers currently use just over 12GB of data a month on average, compared to around 36GB in markets like India, and India itself was sitting at roughly the same 12GB level only about seven years ago. If MTN can get more Africans on reliable home connections and layer streaming, education, gaming, and SME tools on top, every extra gigabyte becomes new revenue. 

That is why the home push sits alongside its fintech plans and potential IHS Towers acquisition; MTN is trying to own not just where Africans connect, but how much and for what. MTN is also moving to absorb 2,762 IHS Towers employees in its $2.2 billion tower buyout, tightening its grip on the institutional memory, the skilled talent, and the infrastructure that will carry all that extra home traffic.

Kenya is considering criminalising certain aspects of AI use. A proposed Artificial Intelligence Bill (2026) would require companies to obtain government approval before deploying “high-risk” AI systems, and would impose fines and jail time for non-compliance.

What even counts as “high-risk” AI? The bill doesn't spell that out yet, but a broad definition could pull in tools used in finance, health, education, and even general-purpose models embedded in local apps. Any AI system that is used in credit scoring, biometrics, and health diagnostics should start watching its back.

What happens to the GPTs and Geminis: Many startups that use AI systems build their models on frontier AI systems developed by large companies, such as Google and OpenAI. This leaves a tricky grey area that raises questions: Do these frontier models require permission, too? If a startup uses one of these models in its product, who seeks permission?

Will this law slow innovation or save it? Kenya is one of Africa’s most active AI markets, which is why this feels like a big moment. On the one hand, regulation could help prevent harm, as AI systems already influence access to financial services and economic opportunities. Oversight might protect users before problems emerge. On the other hand, local and global startups may begin to build elsewhere if approval becomes too slow or risky.

If the balance of this proposed law tilts too far toward restriction, innovation could slow within the region.

South Africa’s Department of Employment and Labour is about to take a key business portal offline for nearly two weeks, which will create headaches for employers who still need to stay compliant. 

From midnight on March 19 to midnight on March 31, the Compensation Fund’s Return of Earnings (ROE) Online System and related employer registration and assessment modules will be shut down so officials can prepare for the 2025 ROE filing season, which runs from April 1 to June 30, 2026.

The ROE is the annual form where employers declare what they paid their staff, so the government can calculate how much they must contribute to the Compensation Fund for workplace injury and illness cover. While the system is offline, companies will not be able to register as employers, submit their ROE declarations, request that assessments be revised, or arrange to pay their bills in installments. It is a long list of blocked services for something that underpins basic corporate compliance.

Yet, not everything goes dark. The CompEasy claims system, which the Compensation Fund uses to process workplace injury and illness claims, will continue to run. Employers will be able to generate a Letter of Good Standing and continue paying what they already owe using their Compensation Fund registration number. 

The department is asking businesses to plan around the outage by filing early once the system reopens, warning that everyone who waits until the June deadline risks slower systems and more downtime as volumes spike.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade