👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Nigeria’s Central Bank is cleaning house

Wazzup.

Happy almost TGIF. As fate and the United States government would have it, Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are back. Fantastic news for tech bros everywhere. And as one wise man once said, “A man who has not hit his Claude limits by noon has wasted his morning.” Go forth and use your Claude tokens today.

—Zia

If you have business with any licenced microfinance bank (MFB), this might be a good time to do a quick roll call.

What happened? On Wednesday, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) withdrew the operating licences of 46 microfinance banks across the country with immediate effect. Add Goldfish MFB, whose licence was suspended in May and disclosed by the CBN on June 30, and 47 microfinance banks now have far bigger problems to worry about. 

What could they possibly have done? According to the CBN, some of the affected institutions no longer had sufficient assets to cover their liabilities; some stopped operating without approval; others became inactive; and a few never even commenced business after receiving licences. Some of the names on the list include Creditville MFB, Gold MFB, NowNow Digital MFB, and Sycamore MFB.

Wait… that Sycamore? That’s probably the name that will make fintechs do a double-take. In May, the Nigerian fintech acquired an MFB in Kano to expand from digital lending into banking and payments. Instead of spending years applying for a banking licence from scratch, fintechs such as Paystack and Flutterwave have acquired existing microfinance banks to inherit the regulatory infrastructure.

Explain like I’m new here: This is CBN reminding everyone that banking licences come with homework and that it is willing to clean house when institutions stop meeting the rules. Even if you’ve never deliberately opened an account with a microfinance bank, there’s a decent chance a fintech you use relies on one behind the scenes. And if that MFB has to stop operations because its licence has been withdrawn, your transfers or top-ups might get affected.

For months, South Africa’s relationship with Starlink, the Elon Musk-owned satellite Internet provider, has been complicated. Now, the country has unveiled its own satellite Internet player. Coincidence? You decide.

What happened? On Tuesday, South Africa launched BrainSAT Satellite Services, a satellite Internet and communications company operating in the country through a partnership with UAE-based satellite operator Space42. The service says it would provide broadband internet and satellite phone connectivity for places like remote villages, mines, ships, or disaster zones.

Explain like I’m new here: Starlink has spent over a year trying to enter South Africa. However, because South Africa has strict local ownership requirements, those expansion efforts have been slowed down. Why BrainSAT is not fighting the same battles as Starlink is because it arrives through a government-backed partnership with Space42 and forms part of South Africa’s own national satellite strategy.

What’s with the interest in satellites? At the end of 2025, over 20% of South Africans remained offline. The country also estimated that it spends about R100 billion ($6 billion) every year on foreign communications services. The government came up with a brilliant plan to cut costs and still show Starlink who’s boss—although indirectly—but someone in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet is acutely aware of the timing and interesting circumstances surrounding this launch.

What South Africans get out of this: If BrainSAT succeeds, people living beyond the reach of fibre and reliable mobile networks could gain another way to get online. Whether BrainSAT, Starlink, or another provider wins customers, the bigger prize is getting more South Africans online.

Oracle, the Larry Ellison-owned US technology giant whose databases and cloud software power thousands of businesses globally, has opened its second research and development (R&D) hub in Morocco, this time in Agadir. Its first centre, launched in Casablanca about a year ago, already employs more than 300 engineers.

The new office isn’t really about Oracle. It’s another vote of confidence in Morocco’s growing reputation as a technology hub.

Why Morocco? The country graduates roughly 10,000 engineers and IT specialists every year, Internet penetration stands at 92.2%, and more than a dozen submarine cables connect it to the rest of the world. Just as importantly, Morocco has spent years giving technology companies something they value almost as much as talent: predictability. Through its Maroc IA 2030 strategy, the government has laid out a long-term roadmap for digital infrastructure and AI, making it easier for global companies to plan investments.

Oracle is hardly alone. In the last two years, the country has attracted infrastructure investments from several global tech players. In 2024, Nokia opened an innovation centre in Salé, Morocco, and has continued to invest in the country. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon also expanded cloud infrastructure in Morocco. Recently, South Korea’s Naver said it was planning to build AI data centres in the North African country. Oracle’s latest move suggests those investments are becoming part of a pattern rather than isolated bets.

Who wins? Morocco’s growing pool of engineers. Oracle plans to invest $140 million in the country by 2030 and wants nearly 1,000 employees by 2027, with almost half of those jobs based outside Casablanca and Rabat.

The bigger picture: Data centres and cloud regions grab the headlines, but R&D centres are harder to fake. Companies only build products where they believe talent will still be available years from now. Oracle’s second investment suggests Morocco has moved beyond being an attractive market. It is becoming a place where global technology companies are comfortable building their future products.

If you work at a Ugandan bank, hospital, telco, or government ministry, there’s a decent chance the company managing your network infrastructure, cybersecurity, or cloud setup is Dimension Data. That company is now calledNTT DATA. Same people. Same offices. Different business cards—and, in theory, a much bigger toolkit.

Here’s the backstory that explains why.Japan’s NTT bought Dimension Data back in 2010 for £2.1 billion ($3.2 billion). The rest of the global branches rebranded to NTT in2019. Africa and the Middle East got a special exemption; the Dimension Data name still meant something here, and NTT didn’t want to throw that away overnight.

April 2024 was when the Middle East and Africa finally switched. Uganda just completed its own version of that transition, sixteen years after the acquisition. 

Why should a Ugandan business care? Under the Dimension Data name, the company was already plugged into NTT’s global resources; it just wasn’t obvious from the outside. As NTT DATA, a$30 billion business that serves 75% of the Fortune Global 100, Ugandan clients now formally access a full stack of cloud, AI, and cybersecurity services.

What next? What matters now is whether NTT DATA Uganda converts 16 years of brand heritage into actual client growth in a market where the CIO suite is increasingly choosing between global names with shallow local presence and local firms with deep market knowledge but limited scale.