Weekly Newsletter

The Tatu City fulfilment centre is the detail that explains everything.

The DFC didn't frame this as a development investment. It framed it as winning 'the AI race for America' — and explicitly said WIOCC is the 'preferred partner for US hyperscalers expanding in Africa.'

A 1,000 per cent rise in transaction volumes sounds extraordinary. But PAPSS's own CEO is saying, in plain terms, that the build phase is over and the real test hasn't started yet.

The question this listing has carried for months was never about the asset — the refinery is real. It was whether ordinary Nigerians would actually show up.

Wave — francophone Africa's most-used payments app, valued above $1.7 billion — appears on neither of the BCEAO's two new lists for its regional instant payment platform.

Here is the uncomfortable twist in the GSMA's numbers: the people being locked out of AI aren't being locked out by a lack of towers or signals. More than 90 percent of the 3.4 billion offline already live within reach of mobile broadband.

The NCC's "bigger clean-up" is the real story here — not just Mafab handing a $273.6 million block it never built on to MTN, but a regulator quietly reshuffling spectrum across multiple holders who couldn't deploy.

TCI Signals says Benin has outpaced Egypt and Kenya in startup funding through eight months of 2026. If true, that would be a genuine shock — Benin is a small West African economy of around 14 million people, not a name that appears…

The real problem Nigeria's January 2027 payment data deadline is surfacing isn't whether local data centres exist — they do. It's that moving a database onto Nigerian soil doesn't make it resilient.

The headline number is $239 million. The number that actually explains it is R240 million — DBSA's anchor commitment.

Airtel Kenya Telesonic recorded zero revenue in both years it existed. Its only meaningful asset — a network licence — was fully written down by the time the doors closed.

That six-month clock is not a formality. Egypt's Financial Regulatory Authority has written a hard reset into the rules: miss the deadline, fail to complete the offering, and the temporary listing is deemed never to have existed.

Nigeria is planning to assemble satellite ground terminals locally — the antennas and dishes that talk to satellites — rather than importing them whole. That's a real step beyond just owning a satellite.

Huawei built 52% of Africa's 5G infrastructure. Washington's answer is a $100 million loan to a single operator serving 15 million people across four countries.

A 92% jump in driver sign-ups in a single week is a striking number — but it mostly tells you how fast people move when their income source disappears overnight.

A tenfold jump in transaction volumes is real progress. But notice what PAPSS's own CEO is saying alongside it: the next phase, starting 2027, is about getting banks and fintechs to actually route everyday payments through the network.

A business growing at 25% with 56 million customers and $245 billion flowing through it annually — and public investors still forced the price down by roughly half.

A 17.1% average yield on Nigerian government bonds — against the new index's 10.4% benchmark average — is not a sign of confidence. It's the price of doubt.

Spiro has 2,500 swap stations, 95,000 bikes, and seven countries of operational muscle. What it has always needed is a manufacturer who can keep pace.