👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – No free exits in Kenya

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• Kenya proposes 15% CGT on foreign exits
• Prosus wants to stop forced Delivery Hero sell-downs
• Shareholders to vote on MTN-IHS deal
• CAR’s new Internet plan
• World Wide Web 3
• Job Openings

Government

Kenya proposes 15% capital gains tax on foreign VC exits

Kenya’s National Treasury secretary John Mbadi. Image source: NMG

Kenya wants foreign investors and venture capital (VC) firms to take a 15% haircut the next time they secure exits from the country’s startups. 

The proposed Finance Bill 2026 would give the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the country’s taxman, the power to tax gains from shares sold offshore, if those shares derive their value from Kenyan assets or operations.

The logic is simple enough: If you made your money in Kenya, the country should get some of it. But the structure of how foreign capital enters African markets has always made this complicated: investors route ownership through Mauritius, the Cayman Islands, or Delaware, not out of bad faith, but because international limited partners require it. That’s the price of accessing global capital, and African startups have largely had no choice but to play by those rules.

Between the lines: What Kenya is really doing here is challenging a system that was never designed with it in mind. The broader question is whether this proposal will make Kenya a more self-determining market or a more expensive one to bet on. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, but the balance is delicate.

Foreign investors already price in risk when they look at African markets. Add tax uncertainty on the way out, and some will simply look elsewhere. Others may restructure their holdings earlier in the investment cycle to sidestep the exposure entirely. 

Kenya has been here before with Tullow Oil and Java House, and had to fight case by case. The proposal would either establish Kenya as a market that captures its fair share of the value it generates, or introduce a new layer of uncertainty that investors were probably not asking for. 

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Companies

Prosus wants the EU to let it keep its Delivery Hero stake

Image Source: TechCentral

Remember when Prosus started selling chunks of its stake in Delivery Hero (DH), a German food delivery giant, trying to meet an urgent deadline? Well… it may now want the European Union (EU) to pause that whole arrangement.

Let’s quickly reheat the tea : In 2025, Prosus, the investment holding company owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, announced plans to acquire Just Eat Takeaway.com, another major European food delivery platform. The EU approved the deal in August 2025 with a major condition that Prosus had to reduce its equity stake in Delivery Hero from 26.3% to a single-digit percentage within 12 months. 

Prosus already holds stakes in Brazil’s iFood, India’s Swiggy, China’s Meituan, Norway’s Oda, and Germany’s Flink. The EU requested that Prosus reduce its stake as part of anti-trust conditions, concerned that Prosus may dominate Europe’s food and grocery delivery market.

To meet that condition, Prosus began selling stakes in DH. First, it sold a 4.5% stake to Uber, the ride-hailing company, in April. It offloaded another 5% to Aspex Management the following month. 

After both deals, Prosus’ ownership in DH dropped to 17%, with even more sell-downs expected. However, it seems Prosus isn’t willing to go down further—at least not without pleading its case first. Bloomberg reported on Monday that the firm wants the EU to drop or soften that requirement.

What might have changed? It looks like Prosus is trying to protect its interest in what looks like a brewing takeover battle. In May, Uber made a takeover offer for DH, valuing the business at €10 billion ($11.6 billion), according to Bloomberg. However, DoorDash, a US competitor for DH and an adjacent rival of Uber (via Uber Eats), also wants its paws on the pie. It is considering a rival bid for parts of DH’s business. If a bidding war drives up Delivery Hero’s valuation, Prosus stands to lose significant upside by being forced to sell its remaining stake at today’s prices. 

Why is Delivery Hero now a catch? The business has been quietly getting healthier. In 2025, it reported operating profitability of €903 million ($1 billion), up 30% year-on-year, alongside positive free cash flow. In 2026, it also struck a deal to offload its Taiwan-based foodpanda to Grab for $600 million, pending regulatory approval. 

What happens now? The EU hasn’t responded, and there’s no guarantee regulators will budge, especially since Prosus has spent months complying already. But one thing is clear: what started as a forced sell-down has become a four-way corporate custody battle between Prosus, Uber, Aspex, and possibly DoorDash.

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M&A

Shareholders to vote on MTN’s $2.2 billion IHS Towers acquisition

Image Source: IHS Towers

MTN’s planned $2.2 billion acquisition of IHS Towers is moving closer to completion, with the tower company’s board throwing its full weight behind the deal ahead of a shareholder vote later this year. MTN and French investment group Wendel already control over 40% of voting rights between them, making approval likely. 

What is worth sitting with is the irony. IHS Towers was built on the premise that infrastructure should be independent, a neutral landlord serving whoever needed towers, across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. That neutrality was the pitch to investors when IHS listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 2021. Four years later, its biggest customer is buying the building.

That shift reflects something larger happening across the continent. African operators have spent years outsourcing infrastructure to focus on their core business. Now they are reversing course, and not quietly. Airtel built out its own fibre management unit. Safaricom took direct control of its tower power systems. Now, in markets where currency swings can make a long-term lease ruinous overnight, owning the infrastructure is starting to look less like a cost and more like a hedge.

The deeper question MTN’s move raises is what happens to the independent tower model in Africa if the continent’s largest operator no longer needs it. Other operators still lease from IHS. But a landlord with a preferred tenant is a different kind of landlord entirely.

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Internet

The Central African Republic is turning to South Sudan to improve its Internet

A street view in CAR. Image source: World Bank

In May, the Central African Republic (CAR) announced plans to launch a new Internet interconnection with South Sudan to strengthen connectivity and reduce its digital isolation. It was reported that the project will be led by the Central African Digital Development Agency alongside MTN, although authorities did not disclose the full technical details or implementation timeline.

It’s a geography problem:Most international Internet traffic travels through subsea cables. However, CAR is bordered by six other African countries: Chad, Sudan and South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Congo-Brazzaville, and Cameroon, which means it has no direct access to the subsea cables. To provide Internet to its citizens, mostly those in urban cities, CAR had to find a workaround: it depended on neighbouring countries.

Before 2023, the Central African Republic relied on satellite and limited cross-border links for connectivity due to the absence of a national fibre backbone. In 2023, the country installed the first national fibre-optic backbone through a connection to Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville under the Central African Backbone (CAB) project.

With an Internet penetration of just over 15%, the new interconnection could make the Internet cheaper, improve stability, and strengthen access to digital services.

Here’s what’s interesting: South Sudan is also landlocked. Until it signed a fibre-optic cable deal with Kenya in 2023, South Sudan relied mostly on a single Internet interconnection route through Uganda.

Yet, Internet infrastructure is really about redundancy. The more routes countries have connecting them to global networks, the more protection it has against vandalism incidents or infrastructure failure.

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CRYPTO TRACKER

The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$76,812	– 0.68	– 1.56%
Ether	$2,098	– 0.40%	– 9.94%
Solstice	$0.1598	– 21.22%	– 21.22%
Solana	$84.68	– 1.60%	– 1.20%

* Data as of 06.50 AM WAT, May 26, 2026.

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• Big Cabal Media — Senior Motion Designer, YouTube Growth Strategist, Editor-in-Chief (TechCabal), Reporter, Enterprise & Policy, Editor (Analytical), Business Development Executive — Lagos, Nigeria 

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Written by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Opeyemi Kareem

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Ganiu Oloruntade

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