👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – A payday for MTN shareholders

Good morning.

I followed the Oscars like someone who had money, pride, and bragging rights on the line. I am not ashamed to say I was one of the odd few who tipped Chloé Zhao for Best Director, even though Paul Thomas Anderson’s work, for the sake of pure cinematography, was right up there. For me, it was as much about Anderson’s stubborn brilliance over the years as it was about wanting to stand slightly apart from the prediction markets and media outlets that were so sure it was finally his year.

Prediction markets live for nights like that. They turn awards, elections, and policy decisions into binary contracts—yes or no, win or lose—and then crowdsource a price that is supposed to reflect collective intelligence. Yet, that price tells us something: the probability of a thing happening, distilled from thousands of tiny bets. But if more of our big cultural and political moments get pre-priced by markets, do we become better informed, or do we just build a new way for insiders, bots, and well-funded actors to tilt expectations and sentiment?

Perhaps everything is a securities derivatives fraud.

Let’s dive in.

—Emmanuel

MTN’s South African retail investors are about to receive their biggest dividend in years, with the telecom giant declaring R5 ($0.30) per share for 2025, up 45% from the previous year and well above the board’s own forecast of R3.70 ($0.22).

Between the lines: The windfall comes off a striking group-wide turnaround. MTN Group, Africa’s largest telco, swung from a R10.9 billion ($652 million) loss in 2024 to a R27.4 billion ($1.64 billion) profit after tax in 2025, driven by a 22.9% rise in service revenue to R218.5 billion ($13 billion) and expense efficiencies of R3.6 billion ($215 million).

Data was the engine: 172.6 million active data customers consumed an average of 12.5 gigabytes (GB) each, pushing total data traffic up 27% to 24.7 petabytes (PB) across the network. MTN’s mobile money arm, MoMo, processed over $500 billion in transaction value, up 15% in volumes.

The more interesting story, though, is the geography of that growth. MTN Nigeria, long the group’s largest market by subscribers, posted 54.9% revenue growth in 2025 and has now overtaken MTN South Africa as the group’s most consequential profit centre. 

Nigeria’s recovery was powered by the naira’s stabilisation after years of devaluation that had wiped significant value off its reported earnings. Aggressive data adoption and telecom tariff increases also pushed the subsidiary’s earnings as more Nigerians increased their online spending.

MTN South Africa, by contrast, grew service revenue by just 2%, hampered by a tough prepaid market and slow economic conditions.

For retail investors, the dividend is the headline, but the structural shift is the real news: MTN’s upside now depends more on how Nigeria, Ghana and other high-growth markets perform than on its home turf.

When Optasia, the South African fintech listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in 2025, the hype was hard to ignore. Its initial public offering (IPO) was heavily oversubscribed and valued the company at R23.5 billion ($1.4 billion). Investors piled in, including one of South Africa’s biggest banking groups, FirstRand, which bought a 20% stake before the listing. 

Optasia represented something big: Optasia uses AI algorithms to assess credit-worthiness from unstructured information that traditional banks often cannot process. It supports small loans averaging $5 and distributes them through partners, like M-PESA and MoMo. A model that allowed the company to reach mobile users who may not need to walk into a bank for loans.

Now, it has delivered: For the financial year ended December 31, 2025, Optasia’s revenue jumped to 76%, reaching $265.4 million. During the period, Optasia facilitated about $5.5 billion in credit volume for its enterprise clients.

And so the public market test begins: IPOs are where hype meets scrutiny because once a fintech lists publicly, investors begin examining profitability and the sustainability of its model. For companies like Optasia, built on lending, its concern will be credit risk and currency swings. 

Optasia’s share price ticked up by 1.88% to reach R19 ($1.2) on the back of Monday’s announcement. However, the stock has declined by over 10% year to date. 

So far, Optasia’s early numbers suggest that its lending model is holding up, but the real test will come in the long run, as the company expands across markets and increases its lending volumes.

Before IHS Towers gets absorbed into MTN Group following its $2.2 billion acquisition, it is scrubbing the books clean, and the 9mobile story is the clearest sign of that.

IHS is a tower company, meaning its entire business model is renting out space on its masts to mobile operators, who pay recurring fees to host their antennas and equipment. When those operators stop paying or become financially unreliable, it creates a mess on the income statement: projected revenue that looks real on paper starts looking like a phantom van carrying cash that never arrives.

Nigeria’s 9mobile, the fourth-largest (and smallest) telecom operator, now rebranded as T2 Mobile, has been exactly that kind of tenant for years: financially distressed, unable to keep up with lease obligations, and increasingly more liability than asset.

State of play: IHS did something pragmatic. It let T2 vacate 2,576 tower sites across Nigeria, in exchange for a structured commitment to repay its historic overdue balances through July 2027. On paper, IHS loses tenants and looks smaller. In practice, it swaps leaky revenue for real cash repayments on a timeline it can plan around, which is a much cleaner position to be in when MTN is doing due diligence.

This is pre-acquisition housekeeping, done openly. MTN wants tower infrastructure, not a portfolio of legacy disputes and bad debts. By cleaning up its weakest tenant relationships, offloading Rwanda operations, and locking in lease amendment upgrades across existing sites, IHS is handing MTN a tighter, more predictable asset. 

The colocation rate dipped slightly, but strip out the T2 and Rwanda exits, and IHS actually added net tenants last year, which shows the core demand for tower space remains solid.

The deal still needs to close, but IHS is clearly not waiting around for MTN to find the skeletons.

South Africa’s retail giant Shoprite is buying a majority stake in R&A Cellular, a point-of-sale (PoS) platform used by informal retailers such as spaza shops (tuck shops in South Africa’s townships or rural areas).

What Shoprite is after: R&A Cellular runs payment terminals used by small merchants to sell prepaid airtime, electricity tokens, gaming products, and accept card payments. 

On the other hand, Shoprite’s Money Market platform has become a financial services engine, where customers can pay bills, send money, buy insurance, or top up airtime within their stores. 

Yet, supermarket branches can only go so far. Instead of setting up a Shoprite store in South Africa’s rural communities, Shoprite can establish its presence through informal retailers.

An easy integration: R&A devices already allowed merchants to sell Shoprite vouchers, so the two companies have been loosely connected. The difference now is ownership and the ability for Shoprite to plug those merchants directly into its financial services network.

The financial terms of Shoprite’s acquisition were not disclosed, and it is still waiting on regulatory approval, but the retail giant’s intention cannot be hidden. 

Rather than building new financial distribution channels from scratch, Shoprite is buying its way into the informal economy’s payment rails, entrenching itself in its home market during a time when adjacent competitor, Mr Price, and fierce close competitor, Spar, are taking their ambitions to Europe.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade