Safaricom’s $309 million bet

Around Tanzania, parents clutch their pearls at the amount of unethical content their children may have been exposed to.

Over 80,000 online platforms, including blogs, websites, and social media accounts, have been shut down in Tanzania after its communications regulatory authority—Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA)—identified their content as a risk to children’s mental health.

Not its first rodeo: Before now, Tanzania has always stood on business in matters concerning published online content. In 2017, the country’s parliament passed the Electronic and Postal Communications Regulations (amended in 2020) that criminalised indecent, hateful, and disruptive content. This policy also mandated that content creators had to obtain a licence in order to publish content or face consequences including prison time, a fine, or both. 

Last year, Tanzania suspended the digital unit of its biggest media house, Mwananchi Communications, over an animated video that depicted a woman—who is ostensibly the nation’s president—flipping through television channels of family members searching for missing loved ones.

Critics say that the government is hiding behind child protection for a wider crackdown on dissent and freedom of speech.

This crackdown raises more questions than it did answers: What qualifies as harmful content, and who makes the call? How were these websites flagged? How was this decision reviewed? Were shutdown creators warned? Why did the parliament ignore the penal measures stated in its online content regulatory policy? Can licenced platforms appeal this takedown? How did the regulatory authority grant licences to so many questionable platforms? 

Answers, when they come, will come from Tanzania’s parliament. Until then, it's anyone's guess. 

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) is still not having a great time getting commercial banks in the country to cooperate. 

Since August 2024, the CBK has been pleading with banks to reduce their lending interest rates so Kenyans can get cheaper loans. To show commitment, the regulator has even cut its own benchmark rate (CBR) five times in a row—yet, banks say “Nope!”

Five banks—Access Bank Kenya, ABC Bank, DIB Bank Kenya, Kingdom Bank, and Guardian Bank Limited—refused to lower their lending rates in April 2025, citing the high rate of loan defaults among Kenyans. Banks say it's too risky to reduce interest rates because they need the buffer to cover losses on those defaults.

ICYMI: Kenya’s economy grew just 4.7% in 2024, missing the 5.7% forecast made a year earlier. Poor performance in the informal sector, manufacturing, and agriculture didn’t help. Kenyans are struggling to access cheap credit, slowing business growth.

The lack of credit sustainability is holding back business expansion, dragging down the broader economy. At the same time, Kenya faced public protests over a controversial Finance Bill that would’ve introduced more taxes. 

The CBK wants to fix this. It believes cheaper loans will improve business activity, which in turn grows the tax base. That’s why it keeps lowering its rate, hoping banks follow suit. But only a few have complied, even with the threat of fines from the regulator.

Yet, banks are also stuck. As of December 2024, loan defaults stood at 16%. Lending in a shaky economy is risky, and banks need higher interest rates to protect themselves from losses.

Currently, the CBK’s benchmark rate is 10.00%, while banks’ average lending rate improved slightly to 15.77% in March. Citibank had the lowest rate at 11.14%, but most others stayed well above the average.

The standoff between the CBK and the banks is like the proverbial tale of the two goats meeting on a narrow bridge—both standing their ground, neither willing to yield. In the end, they'll keep locking horns until one of them falls over.

“Only the paranoid survive.” – Andrew S. Grove, former Intel CEO.

That’s the way Silicon Valley operates. If you doubt us, sit down and investigate why Silicon Valley CEOs stalk each other’s moves like chess grandmasters. Think Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman and their OpenAI bicker. It’s not personal—it’s survival. That same paranoia is seeping into the way some African companies operate. 

Safaricom is one of them. After nearly two decades, how has M-Pesa, its mobile money heavy-weight, stayed relevant in mobile payments?

The answer is paranoia, which births innovation. Safaricom is pumping $309 million annually into M-Pesa, its largest revenue-maker, to open up its super tech infrastructure to Kenyan builders.

It has had to review its principles on how it builds its technology, essentially cannibalising itself. In 2017, for example, Safaricom’s chairman, Nicholas Ng’ang’a, told regulators they should not punish the company for “its success” after being encouraged to share its infrastructure with rivals.

Today, however, Safaricom has walked back on that ideology. Fintechs, conceding that mobile money payments are still second nature to most Kenyans, have mostly tried to build around M-Pesa's tech—like PrivPay, which shut down in 2024.

Cloud-native. API-first. Plug-and-play. Not because it wants to give up ground, but because the more connected M-Pesa becomes, the harder it is to replace. This new infrastructure is designed to be the pipes behind Kenya’s entire payments system—connecting banks, fintechs, SACCOs, card payments, and rival wallets into one interoperable network. 

If a taxi driver gets paid from a bank app, or a vendor uses a SACCO wallet to buy inventory, M-Pesa can still be in the loop—quietly handling the rails, silently earning. Rivals may grow, but only inside a system Safaricom now quietly owns.

It's anybody's guess whether in ten years, mobile money payments will become less popular than they are now in Kenya. But Safaricom and M-Pesa aren't sticking around to find out. With M-Pesa 2.0, they're building the rails to future-proof their payments play.