👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Safaricom ports to South Africa

Good morning.

Layoff announcements are frequent in the ecosystem, but behind every company announcement is a deeper story. TechCabal Insights analysed the data behind layoff events across Africa’s tech ecosystem to reveal where the cuts happened, why they happened, and what they tell us about the future of the ecosystem. Read the full analysis here.

Seven months, three competition regulators, and one court battle later, Vodacom has finally landed one of Africa’s biggest telecom deals.

The South African operator has completed its R35 billion ($2.1 billion) acquisition of an additional effective 20% stake in Safaricom, raising its ownership from 35% to 55%, giving Vodacom majority control. The deal combines a 15% stake bought from the Kenyan government with another 5% acquired from Vodafone International, the South African telco’s subsidiary.

If this sounds like a saga, it was. Since the deal was announced in December 2025, it has survived approvals from competition regulators in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and COMESA, only to be frozen by Kenya’s High Court through a conservatory order after petitioners questioned why the government was selling part of one of its most strategic and profitable assets. On June 26, the Kenyan Court of Appeal lifted that order, clearing the final obstacle before the transaction closed on Tuesday. 

Why did Vodacom fight so hard? Safaricom isn’t just East Africa’s biggest mobile network; it’s one of the continent’s strongest cash generators. In the year ended March 2025, it posted KES 388.7 billion ($3 billion) in revenue and KES 69.8 billion ($540 million) in net profit, powered by M-PESA, the mobile money platform that has become the backbone of Kenya’s digital economy.

Who wins? Vodacom. A larger stake means a larger share of Safaricom’s earnings and greater influence over one of Africa’s most profitable telecom businesses. It also validates a $2.1 billion bet that management argued was worth making despite months of legal uncertainty.

Zoom out: This deal was never just about buying more shares. It was about buying more exposure to Africa’s most successful telecom-fintech ecosystem. For Vodacom, the future of telecom is no longer measured by SIM cards sold, but by how much of the continent’s digital economy flows through the networks it owns.

If you paid for DStv this month expecting to watch the new season of House of the Dragon, we have some bad news. 

Canal+, the MultiChoice owner that operates DStv, is playing a different game of thrones. The payTV operator said it renewed its channels agreement with Warner Bros. Discovery, which runs CNN, Discovery, and Cartoon Network. But the separate deal that brings HBO’s blockbuster shows to your TV screens has expired.

If this feels like déjà vu, it probably is. Remember December 31, 2025? MultiChoice was walking on a similar tightrope when its parent company Canal+ was renegotiating licencing deals for about 12 channels, including CNN and Cartoon Network, to remain on DStv. It got that deal over the line at the eleventh hour. HBO, however, was negotiating under a different contract, and that problem appears to have finally caught up with it.

Explain content leasing like I’m new here: TV channels and TV shows are often licenced separately. A broadcaster can secure the right to carry CNN or Cartoon Network without automatically securing the rights to HBO’s premium catalogue. Canal+ renewed one agreement, but the one covering prestige HBO programming, including House of the Dragon, The White Lotus, and The Last of Us, has lapsed.

Canal+ has stopped short of saying whether negotiations are still underway or whether HBO content is gone for good. Either way, DStv subscribers are discovering that renewing the pipes doesn’t necessarily mean renewing what flows through them.

Is it all part of the plan? Maybe. Canal+ wants DStv to evolve from a traditional pay-TV operator into an entertainment aggregator, as Group CEO Maxime Saada previously said. It already bundles Netflix into several Francophone African countries, and is steering subscribers towards DStv Stream. 

But that strategy only works if the hub keeps attracting the biggest shows. Losing HBO chips away at one of the few reasons many customers still pay for premium television. Whether Canal+ chose that trade-off or simply couldn’t avoid it is the question.

Who loses? DStv Premium subscribers. They are clearly not getting the premium treatment of seeing Emma D’Arcy tear it up as Rhaenyra in the show’s third season—at least not on DStv. HBO has been a cornerstone of M-Net’s premium offering for more than a decade; replacing prestige television is far harder than replacing another lifestyle channel. 

Who wins here? Netflix, Prime Video, and whichever service eventually lands HBO’s African rights. Every premium show that leaves DStv gives viewers another reason to ask whether paying R699 ($43) a month for traditional pay-TV still makes sense.

Sending money used to be enough. Today, every fintech can move money, transfers are becoming commoditised, and customers happily keep five finance apps on the same phone. The real battle is no longer over who processes your payment. It’s over who keeps your money after the payment is done.

Paga’s latest partnership with blockchain startup TBook is the fintech throwing its weight behind that future.

The deal gives users access to tokenised investments, which are digital versions of real-world assets like fixed income, private credit, and real estate. But the blockchain isn’t the interesting part. The business model is. Paga wants to evolve from the app that helps Africans move money into the platform that helps them build wealth.

State of play: Paga Engine processed $12 billion in transaction value in 2025 and now powers payments for more than 300 businesses. In recent months, Paga has added stablecoin settlement through Crossmint, yield-bearing products with Sui, and now tokenised investments through TBook. 

Explain it like I’m new here: Tokenisation simply turns ownership of an asset into digital units on a blockchain. Instead of needing thousands of dollars to invest in a property fund or private credit vehicle, you could buy a small slice through an app. The promise isn’t crypto speculation. It’s making traditionally exclusive investments far easier to access.

Who wins? Fintechs looking for new revenue beyond transaction fees, and consumers whose idle wallet balances could finally earn a return instead of collecting digital dust.

Who loses? Traditional investment firms that have relied on high minimum deposits, paperwork, and exclusivity to keep retail investors on the sidelines.

The timing is hardly accidental. Tokenised real-world assets now represent over $31 billion on public blockchains, while institutions from BlackRock to JPMorgan are experimenting with the same technology. Africa’s fintechs are arriving later, but they’re asking a sensible question: if customers already trust us with payments, why shouldn’t they trust us with investments too?

That question may matter more than the blockchain itself. Consumers don’t wake up asking for tokenised assets. They wake up asking how to make their savings grow without taking reckless risks. Yet, none of this guarantees that Africans will suddenly embrace tokenised investing. But it does suggest that fintech’s next battle won’t be over who moves money the fastest. It’ll be over who gives customers the most reasons to leave it behind.

Somewhere in Accra right now, a Ghanaian student who’s spent the last six months drowning in conflicting advice from three different “education consultants” just got a much simpler answer.

Craydel, the Kenyan edtech that’s basically the GPS for African students trying to study abroad, has landed in Ghana, its eighth market, after Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Tanzania.

Here’s why this matters: Craydel built an AI matchmaker that does for university applications what dating apps do for dating: it takes your grades, budget, career goals, and general vibe, then tells you which of its 380+ partner universities actually wants you back. 

Students use it for free. Universities pay Craydel a commission when a match turns into an enrollment. Nobody’s heart gets broken, mostly.

Why this matters: There are an estimated 400,000 African students who study abroad every year, and for most of them, the system they’re navigating is a maze of fragmented agents, recycled advice, and information that’s outdated by the time it reaches them. Ghana, with one of West Africa’s most ambitious student populations, is fertile ground.

Who’s not happy? Canada’s ApplyBoard and Australia’s IDP Education are the two giants that have dominated global student recruitment for years. Craydel’s whole bet is that “built by Africans, for Africans” beats “built somewhere else, sold to Africans.” So far, eight markets have bought into the philosophy under Craydel’s fourth expansion in the past year.