Kenya’s new Internet bouncers

Happy midweek. ☀️

Spotify wants AI-generated artists to identify themselves, so the next time a random lo-fi track on the streaming platform feels too perfectly engineered for productivity, it may come with an official notice: this musician has never experienced heartbreak, Lagos traffic, or opened their banking app and remembered that “rent is due.” 

Worse, Spotify says it will limit how aggressively those tracks show up in your song recommendations, so if you’ve actually been enjoying AI music, brace yourself.

Let’s dive in.

If you run a local cyber cafe in a corner street in Kenya, it’s no longer business as usual. The country wants to turn you into a data collector. 

From August 14, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK), the country’s communications regulator, said it will require all cafe operators to register every customer that walks into their services and keep detailed session logs for at least three years.

What happened? The CAK is closing an identity gap by mandating public Internet centres to record a customer’s name, ID number, and the exact times they were online. So, don’t be surprised the next time you walk into your favourite cafe and you’re asked to fill a form with your details or log in somewhere; the operators are simply following orders.

Between the lines: Cyber cafes play a critical role in bridging the digital divide in Kenya, where they’re becoming digital service hubs. In 2024, the CAK said “a very large number of entities” operated as cafes in Kenya; though unspecified, it shows the scale of these businesses in the country. According to our checks on business listing platform Yellow Pages, there are at least 300 cafes in Kenya. Given their crucial role in subsidising Internet access—where Kenya is one of the most expensive data markets in Africa—the government is beginning to acknowledge their importance. 

Explain like I’m new here: In 2024, the Kenyan government planned to mandate cafes to install closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras for supervision and collect customer IDs, but that proposal never took off until now. While the regulator dropped more controversial proposals, such as mandatory CCTV and browsing history tracking, operators must still install filters to block illegal websites and seek approval before reselling bulk internet. If they fail to comply, CAK isn't playing: non-compliant cafes face fines of at least KES 500,000 ($3,860) or 0.2% of their annual turnover.

The regulator wants to ensure that if a cybercrime is committed from a shared computer, there is a paper trail leading back to the person in the chair.

Zoom out: Kenya’s new rules mark the end of an era for anonymous public browsing. As the country pushes its National Cybersecurity Strategy, the focus is shifting from access at all costs to access with accountability. With cheaper mobile phones entering Kenya within the last half-decade, the business of running cyber cafes has changed—some of them now see value in taking up printing and government services. In 2020, some operators told local publication Business Daily that revenue was shrinking. 

If those headwinds have continued since then, the new penalties could pit them against Scylla and Charybdis, where operators do not want to risk losing customers to excessive data or activity monitoring demands, yet they also want to stay as far away as possible from paying fines.

If you’ve lived in Johannesburg or Cape Town over the past decade, UberX was probably the ride you booked without thinking. 

It was the default option: affordable enough for everyday trips, reliable enough to replace the awkward taxi negotiation, and familiar enough that Toyota Corolla and Volkswagen Polo Vivo-class sedans became part of the urban mobility lore.

From September 1, however, that option is gone. 

Uber, the American ride-hailing giant that entered South Africa in 2013, says it is retiring UberX and replacing it with Uber Go, Uber Comfort, Uber Black, and Uber Reserve.

What happened? Uber says it wants a “simpler, more tailored lineup.” The change splits the old UberX audience into two groups: riders who want the cheapest possible trip (Uber Go) and riders willing to pay extra for newer cars, more space, or premium service (Comfort and Black).

Explain like I’m new here: UberX was the middle ground between Uber Black’s premium Mercedes-and-Audi experience and South Africa’s traditional taxi industry. Launched in Johannesburg in 2014 before expanding to other cities, it helped turn ride-hailing from a luxury product into a mass-market transport option.

Between the lines: Uber’s move to pull UberX could signal a low-margin problem. South Africa’s e-hailing market has become a fierce price war between Uber and Bolt, another ride-hailing giant with a major presence in the country; both platforms are chasing cost-conscious users while dealing with rising repeated concerns over driver earnings, service quality, and safety.

Uber said it became too difficult for riders to distinguish between standard UberX and other vehicle categories. The company wants clearer definitions between budget options and higher-spec cars. 

Zoom out: The retirement of UberX marks the end of South Africa’s ride-hailing honeymoon phase. The industry is no longer trying to convince people to use app-based transport, but trying to figure out how to offer cheaper rides without eroding trust, safety, and profitability in the process.

Sending money across borders is still one of the most expensive and frustrating parts of doing business in emerging markets. A transfer that takes seconds domestically can still take days internationally, with multiple banks taking a cut along the way.

The BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and newer members—is now discussing whether their fast payment systems (FPS) and sovereign central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could be linked together. While the conversation is still at an early stage, the idea that CBDCs—which are blockchain-based digital tokens of local currencies issued by central banks—could play a role in cross-border finance was not on our bingo card. We’re slowly embracing the possibility that regulators may prefer CBDCs to stablecoins, even though the two can technically co-exist. 

What happened? Sanjay Malhotra, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, said BRICS members are exploring ways to connect their real-time payment rails and potentially use CBDCs for cross-border settlement. The central bank’s goal is to make international payments faster and cheaper.

Explain like I’m new here: Think of South Africa’s PayShap as a domestic highway that moves money almost instantly between local banks. BRICS is discussing whether countries could build bridges between those highways; a payment from Johannesburg to Mumbai or São Paulo would not need to travel through the slower traditional correspondent-banking system.

An obvious blocker is that most countries have not launched CBDCs yet. Many are still in the research or pilot phase, while only a handful, including Nigeria (eNaira), Jamaica (Jam-Dex), and the Bahamas (Sand Dollar), have gone live. If BRICS is ultimately building a payment network around centrally issued and monitorable digital currencies, it will need far more countries, starting with its own members, to move from experimentation to deployment before any broader expansion beyond the bloc becomes realistic. 

Between the lines: Yet, South Africa is not starting from scratch. The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and BankservAfrica have already connected South Africa and Zambia through a 60-second cross-border settlement corridor, and additional Southern African Development Community (SADC) links are being rolled out. Lesetja Kganyago, SARB’s governor, has consistently argued that interoperable national payment systems are more practical than creating a common BRICS currency.

Zoom out: A functioning BRICS payment network would matter far beyond central bankers. It could lower transaction costs for African exporters, fintech companies, remittance providers, and businesses trading with India and China. If the plan follows through, South Africa’s payment infrastructure could soon become part of a much larger settlement network for emerging markets, possibly reducing dependence on the traditional dollar-centred plumbing of global finance.

Imagine the pilot of a plane deciding it’s time to take the controls back from the co-pilot after 30 years of smooth flying. That is essentially what is happening in South Africa’s financial cockpit. 

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB), the country’s central bank, is revamping the management of its national payment system for the first time since 1996.

What happened? On Tuesday, the SARB withdrew its recognition of the Payments Association of South Africa (PASA) as the primary management body for the country’s payments. The central bank is now assuming direct control over regulatory and oversight functions that PASA has handled for nearly three decades. The remaining operational functions, including the management of PayShap, South Africa’s instant payment platform for real-time bank-to-bank transfers, and real-time clearing, will transition to a new entity called “PayInc” by September 2.

Explain like I’m new here: For years, PASA acted as a self-regulatory middleman, managing how banks and payment providers cleared transactions like EFTs and debit orders. By taking the wheel, the SARB is cutting out the middleman for the big stuff, such as setting standards and managing system-wide risks. It’s a shift from a self-regulated industry to one where the central bank is the definitive headmaster. The good news for South Africans is that card payments, automated teller machine (ATM) withdrawals, and PayShap transfers will continue as usual during the handover.

Why now? The maths of the modern economy demands it. By centralising oversight, the bank aims to make the national payment system more resilient to shocks and better equipped to handle new fintech innovations. It’s about ensuring that as the volume of digital transactions grows, the foundation they sit on is as solid as the vault at the Reserve Bank.

Zoom out: South Africa’s move reflects a global trend where central banks are becoming more hands-on with the technology that moves money. Until the new structure under PayInc is fully bedded down, the transition remains a significant test of the SARB’s ability to manage the day-to-day plumbing of the economy. In the race to modernise, the bank has decided that after 30 years, the best way to ensure the future is to manage it directly.