Kenya's taxman is watching

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Our latest Francophone Weekly edition is live, and this week we are in DR Congo looking at how a three-pronged combination of dogged startups, tech enablement policies, and small but risky capital is building one of Africa’s most overlooked digital frontiers.

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Let's dive in.

Kenya is about to sell a chunk of its crown jewel, Safaricom—the country's largest telecoms firm—to plug a hole in the national wallet and deepen its ties to South Africa’s biggest telco group at the same time.

Two key parliamentary committees have now endorsed the government’s plan to sell 15% of its Safaricom stake for KES 204 billion ($1.5 billion) and route the money into a new National Infrastructure Fund, clearing the main political hurdle before a full House vote. 

Safaricom is not some sleepy state-owned enterprise (SOE); it is one of Kenya’s most profitable companies and a tax-and-dividend machine, thanks largely to M‑PESA’s dominance in mobile money and the broader digital economy. 

The government is not exiting entirely—it will fall from 35% to about 20%—but it is cashing out part of a very good asset at a time when debt service is eating the budget.

The committees’ logic is straightforward: this is equity, not Eurobonds. Selling shares raises cash without adding new debt, and ring‑fencing the proceeds for roads, energy and other long‑term projects via an infrastructure fund makes it look like an investment, not short‑term deficit plugging.

Politically, it also shores up the Safaricom–Vodacom–Vodafone triangle. Vodacom already is the largest shareholder and has been pulling regional operations (Ethiopia, M‑PESA Africa) into a more integrated group strategy; this deal effectively tightens that grip.

The trade-off is subtle. Kenya swaps a slice of future upside in its most strategic corporate asset for immediate fiscal relief and more South African control over a core piece of its telecoms and fintech stack. Whether that is smart portfolio management or selling the family silver depends on what the infrastructure fund actually builds, and how disciplined the Treasury is about not raiding it the next time the budget runs hot.

Smile, you’re on camera. At Kenya’s busiest airport, tax officers are about to become the stars of their own surveillance show.

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the country's taxman, has begun rolling out body-worn cameras for customs officers at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), the country's largest airport and busiest in East Africa, to curb corruption.

What's happening at JKIA? The airport is one of the country’s busiest entry points for cargo and travellers, and customs just so happens to be one of the most lucrative divisions within the tax authority. The agency collects a 16% value-added tax (VAT) on imports and excise duty on certain products, like vehicles. 

But there have been some under-the-table actions by officers who facilitate fraudulent clearances, and are apparently living larger than their paycheck.

KRA's solution is a camera: About 350 customs officers and border control staff will wear the cameras during interactions with importers and clearing agents to record every encounter and make bribery much harder to pull off. Once a shift ends, officers return the devices to docking stations, and then the footage is uploaded to a Central Command Centre. This centre stores and reviews the recordings in real time or after they happen.

It’s a human’s world: Even with cameras, humans still manage the system. A person in the back room reviews the footage, stores the data, and even decides what recordings matter or not. If corruption thrives on human discretion, couldn't that discretion simply move from the airport desk to the monitoring room? 

The KRA says the new system will help discourage bribery and backhanded import deals and practices that, according to the National Taxpayers Association (NTA), drain KES 253 billion ($1.95 billion) from Kenya’s coffers every year. Yet, cameras alone might likely not erase the creativity of people, especially those in power, determined to bend the rules.

Nigeria’s Internet user base is growing even as it gets more expensive and frustrating to stay online. 

According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country's telecoms regulator, Internet penetration hit 53% in January on the back of Airtel and MTN’s aggressive rollout of new sites, fibre, and 5G, even as the median smartphone price climbed from $50 to $54 in 2024, and network quality still swings by neighbourhood. 

More Nigerians are choosing to stay connected and are quietly rewarding whichever provider offers the path of least resistance: stronger signal, fewer dead zones, fewer mysterious network slowdowns.

Between the lines: This is happening while incomes are under pressure, which makes the choice to keep buying data and upgrading phones even more revealing. Connectivity has shifted from “nice to have” to infrastructure for work, school, side hustles, and entertainment, so people will cut other corners before they cut the Internet. 

This behaviour opens space for almost every serious player in the stack. Mobile network operators sit at the centre, but other fibre- and satellite-based internet providers stand to gain if they can guarantee stable service in the places people actually live, commute, and hustle.

State of play: High switching costs still blunt how competitive the market feels. SIM registration rules, number-portability friction, device compatibility issues, and sheer mistrust from previous outages or billing disputes make many users stick with a mediocre network rather than risk a new one. A telecom operator can lose a customer once and never see them again. 

In a world where data and airtime are taking a bigger slice of monthly income, the operators that keep investing in coverage and capacity, and keep performance close to peak levels, are the ones most likely to enjoy the upside as Nigeria’s Internet habits deepen and average spend per user rises.

African startups raised about $3.42 billion in 2025, but the mood around funding has shifted, as investors are writing fewer cheques. In that rough is the diamond thought that startups need systems and structure in place to scale, not capital alone. That is where Co-creation HUB (CcHUB), Nigeria’s first innovation centre and technology hub, has decided to operate.

According to its latest impact report, the innovation hub deployed $4.18 million in grants and subgrants and supported 3,312 ventures across 49 African countries in 2025. CcHUB says every dollar deployed helped startups attract five dollars more from external investment.

The three musketeers of CcHUB’s strategy: Its work in 2025 centred on three sectors where it believes innovation can have the biggest ripple effects: education, health, and the creative economy. In education, the hub launched 15 new edtech products and accelerated 27 startups building tools for digital learning across Nigeria and Kenya. In healthcare, its work focused on digital public infrastructure, producing six AI-enabled health products that work together. CcHUB ran 16 accelerator cohorts across fashion, film, music, design, and media in the creative economy, helping 640 women launch or scale their ventures.

The ecosystem middleman: CcHUB plays a role in translating between startups and other ecosystem players, including the government, parties that rarely move at the same speed. Across Africa, governments are drafting digital economy policies that shape how startups operate, and at the same time, founders are raising capital and trying to scale within those rules. That is where organisations like CcHUB come in to produce stronger companies.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade