👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Dangote IPO heads south

Dangote’s refinery may be sitting in Lagos, but it’s turning its initial public offering (IPO) into a pan-African roadshow, and southern Africa is getting its own entry point.

What happened? The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Committee of Stock Exchanges has selected Botswana as the host trading venue for investors in the region who want to access the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals IPO. SADC is a regional bloc of 16 southern African countries, and its capital-market committee brings together the region’s stock exchanges. 

The idea is to avoid each market building its own separate arrangement for the same Nigerian share offer. Botswana’s stock exchange will serve as the common venue, while Access Bank Botswana will act as the country’s depository receipt issuer.

Explain like I’m new here: Aliko Dangote’s oil refinery wants to issue 4.1 billion shares to raise ₦2.15 trillion ($1.6 billion) from the capital markets. The company says investor interest has already been oversubscribed by more than three or four times. Yet, on Tuesday, it extended the offer to October 27 to give more (pan-African) investors time to participate.

How does a Botswana investor buy a Nigerian refinery? Investors can gain exposure through Botswana Depository Receipts (BDRs)—certificates that represent shares in a company listed in another country. Kenya got its own route earlier this month after its Capital Markets Authority (CMA) approved a Global Depository Receipt (GDR) structure. Renaissance Capital Kenya is arranging the GDRs, which represent shares in Dangote Refinery and are intended to trade on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

What about Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe is also a SADC country, but Bard Santner Investors, an asset manager, had already created a route for Zimbabwean investors before the Botswana announcement. The asset manager is facilitating applications locally, moving clients’ funds through Ecobank Zimbabwe to Ecobank Nigeria and using Ecobank Nigeria’s nominee structure to hold the shares and submit applications. 

However, Botswana becoming the SADC host does not erase that arrangement. It means the region now has a designated market for the IPO, while Zimbabwe already has a separate local facilitation route in place. Dangote’s pan-African IPO is still gathering momentum, with more African markets finding ways to let their investors in.

There are many ways to make money from an initial public offering (IPO). Buying the shares is only one of them.

Quickmart’s owners will spend about KES 575.6 million ($4.5 million) to list the supermarket chain on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE), according to local publication Business Daily. The money will go to investment banks, lawyers, accountants, regulators, marketers and the other firms required to take a private company public.

What happened? Professional advisers, including SBG Securities, Stanbic Bank and Dyer & Blair, will share about KES 476.2 million ($3.7 million). Another KES 70 million ($542,000) goes to marketing, while the Capital Markets Authority and NSE will collect about KES 24 million ($186,000).

Explain like I’m new here: Quickmart, the Kenyan retailer, has filed to go public. Its sole shareholder, Sokoni Retail Kenya, is selling two billion existing shares, 50% of the company, at KES 7.50 ($0.058) each. So the KES 15 billion ($116 million) raised goes to Sokoni, which also pays the IPO bill. After fees, it should leave with roughly KES 14.4 billion ($111 million).

Between the lines: The fees work out to about 3.8% of the offer, or KES 0.29 ($0.002) for every share sold. That is the price of creating liquidity for Quickmart’s existing owners and turning their private stake into something thousands of investors can buy and trade.

A broader business is also forming around Kenya’s return to listings. Advisers and regulators earned KES 2.99 billion ($23.1 million) from the Kenya Pipeline IPO, while Family Bank paid KES 77.2 million ($598,000) simply to list by introduction.

Zoom out: Quickmart’s offer closes on October 30, with trading expected to begin on November 12. If Kenya keeps producing IPOs, the winners will not only be companies and investors. The firms paid to get those deals over the line are building a nice business too.

Kenya has spent almost three years fixing a label that does not stop money from moving in and out of the country, but can make every movement more expensive to explain.

What happened? Kenya’s Financial Reporting Centre says the country has now completed 19 of 21 action items required by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global financial watchdog, clearing six in the past two and a half months. The country aims to exit the grey list by April 2027.

Explain like I’m new here: FATF placed Kenya under increased monitoring in February 2024 after a 2022 review found weaknesses across its anti-money laundering system. The original action plan covered everything from supervising banks and other financial businesses to identifying company owners, improving suspicious transaction reports, regulating crypto companies, and actually turning financial intelligence into money-laundering investigations and prosecutions.

Kenya has chipped away at that list. It passed rules for virtual asset providers in 2025 and issued regulations for operators in July 2026; strengthened terrorism-financing investigations; and updated its national risk framework. By June, FATF was still asking for improvements in seven broad areas, including beneficial ownership, financial intelligence, and prosecutions.

Between the lines: Grey-listing does not automatically force foreign banks or fintechs to stop serving Kenya. FATF explicitly says institutions should use a risk-based approach rather than cut countries off. But compliance teams still price country risk into their decisions. More questions, more documents, and more monitoring can slow Kenyan transactions or make them more expensive.

Europe adds another layer. Since August 2025, Kenya has also been on the European Union’s (EU) list of high-risk countries, requiring European banks and other regulated firms to apply extra checks.

This is where an exit could pay off in practice. It will not suddenly reverse every service restriction Kenyan freelancers and businesses have faced from PayPal, Sendwave, and other global platforms. Those companies have cited different reasons for their decisions. But it removes one country-level risk flag when banks, payment companies, and investors decide how deeply they want to operate in Kenya.

What to watch: Kenya can complete all 21 items and remain on the list for a while. FATF must first agree that the action plan is substantially complete, conduct an on-site assessment, and then approve removal at a plenary. Nigeria and South Africa went through that process before leaving the grey list in October 2025.

The Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA), the country’s telecom regulator, has given Internet service providers (ISPs) 30 days to fix problems with their fibre-optic installations. During inspections, the regulator said it found leaning poles, cables hanging too low, and infrastructure without markings showing who owns it. Damaged fibre can cause prolonged Internet outages for everyone connected to those networks, and TCRA isn’t willing to take that risk.

Explain like I’m new here: Tanzania’s telecom operators are laying more fibre because demand for more reliable Internet is growing. State-owned Tanzania Telecommunications Corporation (TTCL) is expanding its fibre network and plans to reach 1 million households by June 2028. Yas Tanzania, one of the country’s major operators, is also expanding its home fibre service beyond Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital city, with plans to connect up to 100,000 households in Zanzibar within three years. More fibre means more cables and other infrastructure alongside roads and buildings, and the more infrastructure that goes up, the more there is to maintain.

Why are they doing this? As of March 2026, Tanzania had about 590,000 fixed-Internet subscriptions. Wireless connections still made up most of them, but nearly 199,000 were wired connections, including fibre. As that number grows, the quality of the physical network becomes just as important as how much fibre operators can lay. A faster Internet network is useless if the cable carrying it is hanging low enough to be caught by a truck. 

TCRA is also pushing operators to share infrastructure rather than repeatedly installing their own poles and ducts. Its 2026 fibre deployment rules require operators to consider sharing existing infrastructure when installing new poles and ducts. The regulator’s 30-day deadline aims to ensure the country’s fibre boom does not create a bigger maintenance problem down the road.

CRYPTO TRACKER

The World Wide Web3

Source:

Coin Name	Current Value	Day	Month
Bitcoin	$80,992	– 3.00%	+ 4.60%
Ether	$2,358	– 5.81%	– 5.21%
XRP	$1.30	– 4.93%	– 7.26%
Solana	$102.15	– 4.79%	+ 1.30%

* Data as of 06.36 AM WAT, October 15, 2026.

Written by: Emmanuel Nwosu and Yemi Kareem

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade