👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – The Wolf of safe streets

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On the Francophone Weekly by TechCabal, our latest newsletter for French-speaking Africa, we’ve been discussing capital efficiency in Africa’s tech ecosystem for a month now. We explored debt as a growth-friendly financial vehicle for operations-heavy startups, spotlighting Julaya, an Ivorian SME-focused fintech adopting this strategy. Later, we shifted the conversation to how Africa can use local exchanges as a capital-raising avenue for growth-stage startups, and even SMEs, to access sustainable capital.

This week, we’re publishing the second part of our series examining how local exchanges can attract SMEs to list, using the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières (BRVM), the regional bourse serving eight French-speaking West African countries, as our case study. We speak with Houmou Ormon, director of the BRVM national representative office, about the bourse’s potential as a capital-raising option for startups and what they’ve learned from SMEs and founders. Sign up here to receive today’s newsletter straight to your inbox.

Catch up on previous editions of Francophone Weekly by TechCabal.

Do you remember the whole Vodacom-Safaricom dance we delivered to your inbox on Friday? The one where we noted that Vodafone, owned by Vodacom, now has a 55% majority control stake in Safaricom due to the Kenyan government selling 15% of its stake. Remember, we noted Vodacom was still awaiting regulatory approvals from the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), the Competition Authority (CAK), the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), and regional competition bodies before gaining full control. Vodacom has also said it is not trying to take full control of Safaricom, but well, whatever the long-term plan is, the Kenyan government has given conditions for the deal to progress, and they are… firm.

Top of the list: Safaricom’s CEO and board chair must be Kenyan citizens. Full stop. Regardless of a foreign majority ownership or not, the Kenyan government wants leadership to stay local.

That’s just the beginning: Vodacom cannot alter Safaricom’s name, trademarks, brand identity, or corporate symbols without government approval. It also can not introduce sweeping changes to suppliers or declare staff redundancies outside normal business cycles. Even expansion outside Kenya requires consultation with the state. In addition, all Safaricom and M-PESA Foundation trustees must be Kenyan, and its funds must be spent domestically.

What does this mean? The Kenyan government needed some extra cash, but not a loss of control. Safaricom is a national asset, and these conditions allow the government to preserve its identity, workforce, and regional priorities even after selling a significant stake. 

Is this unusual in Africa? Surprisingly, no. Countries often tighten governance rules when foreign ownership rises. In Ethiopia, foreign investors are only allowed to own up to 49% of local banks. This is after decades of the country’s banking industry being off-limits for foreign players.

Can Kenya do this legally? If Vodacom agreed to the terms, and it looks like they did, then absolutely. So yes, Vodacom is getting 55%, but Kenya is holding the steering wheel with two hands.

Community Wolf, a South African safety-tech startup, has acquired emergency-response app Namola for an undisclosed amount, and this consolidation actually matters for a country where safety failures are a daily reality. 

The deal is less about consolidation and more about whether technology can finally knit together a system that has long been defined by fragmentation, uneven service quality, and slow, unreliable response times.

State of play: South Africa’s safety landscape has strong players, but none of them talk to each other. Police data is delayed, neighbourhood groups rely on WhatsApp chaos, private security firms guard specific pockets, and emergency numbers vary from province to province. Community Wolf thinks there’s an opportunity to build a single layer that pulls all of this together. 

Its AI-driven WhatsApp reporting already gives communities real-time visibility that SAPS simply can’t. Namola brings something Wolf lacks: a nationwide, established response network with a decade of user trust.

Between the lines: That is why this acquisition is interesting. It is not about scale for the sake of scale; it is about combining immediacy with infrastructure. If it works, Community Wolf becomes the platform that sits above South Africa’s messy safety ecosystem and makes it usable. That is a compelling ambition in a market projected to reach almost $2 billion by 2030.

Is this a win for Africa? It’s at least a win for continuity. Namola gets revived instead of shelved. Community Wolf gains the legitimacy and distribution it could never build quickly on its own. The hard part now is execution. But if the integration holds, this could be one of the rare deals that genuinely shifts how everyday people experience safety in South Africa.

In more South African acquisition news, Capitec Bank, South Africa’s largest retail bank by customer base, has signed a deal to acquire Walletdoc, a South African fintech, for R400 million ($23 million). Capitec will put R300 million ($17 million) down in cash upfront, with the remaining balance paid over three years as an earn-out tied to Walletdoc hitting performance targets. This means that if Walletdoc grows as Capitec hopes, the founders will get their balance. If not, they don’t.

Why does this matter? Capitec wants to expand beyond retail banking and sink its teeth deeper into South Africa’s fast-growing payments ecosystem. Walletdoc’s stack, including online payments, digital wallets, and real-time payouts, fits neatly into Capitec’s ongoing push to compete directly with Payfast, Peach Payments, Yoco, and the broader merchant services market.

And Capitec is not alone. In August 2025, South Africa’s Nedbank acquired Durban fintech, iKhokha, for $93 million to boost SME services.

The acquisition comes after Capitec partnered with Stitch, one of South Africa’s largest payments fintech startups, to allow customers to automate recurring payments for services like Netflix, deliveries, and bills, using Variable Recurring Payments (VRP), a smarter form of direct debit.

This isn’t Capitec’s first expansion beyond retail banking. In 2019, it acquired Mercantile Bank to enter the SME/business-banking market, and in 2024, it increased its stake in European online-lending fintech Avafin from 40.66% to 97.69%. The Walletdoc deal is still pending regulatory processes before further details emerge.

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Starlink rebounds in Kenya, hits 19,460 active users for the first time

Image source: Tenor

If you love a good comeback story, we’re not sure you’ll like this one if you’re anti-Elon Musk. But Starlink, the billionaire’s satellite internet company, is blowing hot again in Kenya.

After last year’s humiliating freeze on urban sign-ups—an embarrassing admission that Nairobi and Mombasa users were pushing the network to its limits—the satellite provider has bounced from its sub-17,000 decline in June back to 19,460 active users, its highest yet.

Starlink previously paused new registrations in November 2024, only resuming in June 2025, and has seen a strong renewed uptake from customers. Yet the market Starlink is returning to isn’t the one it left. That six-month pause gave competitors exactly what they needed: time. 

Safaricom used it to quietly cement its dominance, expanding fibre and blanketing more towns with affordable 5G routers. It now commands 35.6% of the fixed-internet market, while Airtel followed with its own cut-price hardware. 

For most users—especially the mass market that simply wants “fast enough” internet at the lowest possible cost—KES 3,000 ($23) routers beat a KES 27,000 ($208) Starlink Mini every day of the week.

Starlink’s edge is no longer selling novel technology, as customers now want whatever is good enough and cheap. Yet its real play is holding the high ground in places where “good enough” still isn’t available—rural pockets where fibre won’t go and 5G can’t hold a signal. That reliability premium might be the lifeline Starlink needs, especially as the market shifts toward low-cost hardware.

The Information reports that its parent company, SpaceX, is eyeing a 2026 IPO, keeping Starlink as part of that deal, and reversing earlier spin-off plans. If SpaceX becomes a publicly traded company, Starlink’s performance in frontier markets like Kenya will become part of the growth story SpaceX has to sell to investors, putting more pressure on the satellite unit to prove it can scale beyond being a niche premium option.

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