Airtel Africa is seeking to permanently cancel 13.7 million shares it has repurchased from investors, while Cape Town has launched battery-powered public buses and Kenya has completed a new regulatory framework for virtual asset service providers.

The developments were among several business and technology updates across Africa, alongside a prolonged outage of Kenya’s electronic tax invoicing system and new job openings in the region’s technology sector.

Airtel Africa seeks to cancel 13.7 million repurchased shares

Airtel Africa, one of the continent’s largest telecommunications companies with operations in 14 countries, has spent the past two months buying back its own shares from investors. The company has repurchased 13.7 million shares so far and plans to cancel them permanently rather than hold them for future resale.

The buyback programme began in May. Between July 13 and July 17, Airtel Africa bought back more than 800,000 shares. The programme is targeting 1% of Airtel’s issued capital, which means additional buybacks may follow.

Cancelling repurchased shares reduces the total number of shares in circulation. If the company retained those shares, it could later reissue or sell them, increasing the number of shares again and diluting existing investors. By cancelling them, Airtel makes the reduction permanent.

For shareholders who keep their shares, the cancellation means each remaining share represents a slightly larger stake in the company and a larger claim on future profits. It also means future profits would be distributed across fewer shares. Even if Airtel earns the same amount of money next year, earnings per share (EPS)—a measure of how much profit is attributable to each outstanding share—could rise because fewer shares would share the same profit pool.

Airtel Africa has spent about $100 million on the buyback programme. At the same time, it has more than tripled capital spending to $389 million in Q2 2026. The company also said it built more than 920 new network sites and expanded its fibre network to 82,100 kilometres.

The combination of buybacks, higher network investment, and a planned fintech listing shows Airtel managing several capital priorities at once: reducing its share count, expanding telecom infrastructure, and looking for ways to unlock value from mobile money.

Airtel is also preparing to list Airtel Money, its fintech arm, on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) later this year to unlock capital.

Cape Town launches battery-powered MyCiTi buses

Cape Town has launched its first battery-powered MyCiTi bus, becoming the first South African city to put electric buses, or e-buses, on the road for public use.

On July 24, Geordin Hill-Lewis, the mayor of Cape Town, unveiled the Volvo BZRLE e-buses in Khayelitsha, a southeastern town in Cape Town, South Africa. An initial 38 buses will be deployed immediately on South African roads, with more batches scheduled for March 2027.

The Volvo e-buses, nicknamed “Evie,” were partly manufactured in South Africa, with their frames assembled locally. That makes them the first electric buses produced in South Africa specifically for local roads.

The buses will operate on routes linking Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha, Wynberg, Claremont, and Cape Town’s central business district as part of the R7.2 billion ($427 million) MyCiTi Phase 2A expansion. The expansion will extend the bus network to more than 30 communities.

Cape Town has been testing electric buses since 2020, when Golden Arrow Bus Services began piloting them. Golden Arrow now has more than 80 electric buses on the road. Cape Town’s MyCiTi fleet is following that early deployment.

The city is partnering with the University of Cape Town (UCT) on a 12-month research programme to study battery performance and charging times before rolling out the full fleet. Those results will matter because bus operators need predictable range, charging schedules, and maintenance plans before replacing larger parts of a public transport fleet.

South Africa has lost roughly half of its oil-processing capacity in recent years as refineries closed. The country now imports most of its refined fuel and has become Africa’s largest fuel importer. An electric bus fleet could reduce some transport exposure to fuel supply complications.

Funding remains a constraint. South Africa’s National Treasury is phasing out the Public Transport Network Grant that funds Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems, with R8.4 billion ($500.9 million) in cuts over three years. Hill-Lewis warned that the MyCiTi expansion depends on continued national funding. Cape Town accounts for roughly 42% of all BRT passenger trips in South Africa.

Kenya completes rules for digital asset firms

Kenya has gazetted its Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, completing a legal framework that began with the VASP Act last year. The move follows four months of public consultation and debate after Kenya’s National Treasury opened the draft regulations for public comment in March.

The new framework applies to cryptocurrency exchanges, wallet providers, token issuers, custodians, stablecoin companies, tokenisation platforms, and other digital asset firms that want to operate in Kenya. Those firms can now apply for licences and operate under formal supervision.

Oversight will be split between the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the Capital Markets Authority (CMA). The CBK will regulate crypto-to-fiat services and stablecoins, while the CMA will oversee exchanges, token offerings, and tokenised assets.

For years, crypto businesses in Kenya operated in a legal grey area. They were not fully illegal, but they were also not recognised as financial institutions. That made it difficult for operators to open bank accounts, attract institutional investors, and launch new products.

Access to banking services became especially difficult after the CBK warned financial institutions in 2015 against “dealing with virtual currencies or transacting with entities that are engaged in virtual currencies.” As a result, crypto operators relied on workarounds, including peer-to-peer transactions and payment service providers willing to support them. Those payment providers accepted the risk because onboarding more businesses meant more revenue.

Kenya’s approach brings digital assets into the country’s existing financial architecture. Money-like products will be regulated by the central bank, while investment products will be supervised by the capital markets regulator.

Kenya is not the first country to regulate crypto. Its model follows a broader direction seen in the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regime, Dubai’s dedicated crypto regulator, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, and Nigeria’s more recent executive order on virtual assets. These frameworks have generally moved toward supervision rather than outright bans.

Regulation raises compliance costs for digital asset firms, but it can also reduce uncertainty. Banks may become more willing to work with licensed firms, institutional investors may become more comfortable deploying capital, and global exchanges may have a clearer route into the Kenyan market.

Across Africa, the next phase of crypto activity is increasingly focused on who builds the infrastructure around adoption. Countries are competing to become jurisdictions where companies such as Coinbase, Kraken, HTX, or stablecoin issuers such as Tether could establish operations.

Kenya’s eTIMS outage stretches beyond planned maintenance

A planned 20-hour maintenance window for Kenya’s electronic tax invoicing system turned into a multi-day outage, leaving thousands of businesses unable to generate invoices they are legally required to produce.

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) said the Electronic Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS) and its predecessor, TIMS, would be unavailable from 6 p.m. on July 22 until 2 p.m. the following day. By the afternoon of July 24, the system was still offline. KRA issued a second notice citing a technical hitch and said its team was working on the issue.

On Saturday, KRA said on X that the service was back up and running. The X post is available at https://x.com/i/status/2081051294735749262. However, replies under the post indicated that some taxpayers were still locked out.

Kenya has been trying to digitise tax collection processes since at least 2014, when it launched the iTax platform. The effort is aimed at reducing high non-compliance rates that remain a documented challenge.

eTIMS, launched in 2023, was designed to make it harder for businesses to hide taxable transactions. Since January 2024, KRA has required that only expenses backed by eTIMS invoices are eligible for tax deductions.

The Finance Act 2026, signed into law on June 23, tightened enforcement further. It introduced minimum penalties of KES 100,000 ($770) for companies and KES 10,000 ($77) for individuals who fail to use the system.

Every invoice generated through eTIMS is transmitted to KRA in real time, giving the tax authority visibility into who sold what, when, and for how much. For businesses, this means an expense cannot be claimed as a tax deduction unless the invoice was generated through eTIMS. For KRA, it reduces reliance on self-reported tax returns.

The extended downtime created practical problems for businesses. They could not issue compliant invoices, claim deductible expenses, or produce official proof of transactions through the system. The outage created a gap between transactions that occurred and transactions recorded by eTIMS.

Kenya is building one of Africa’s most ambitious real-time tax surveillance systems, but the eTIMS outage showed that the system’s usefulness depends on its availability. When a single government platform becomes the gatekeeper for business invoicing, downtime can affect a broad range of taxpayers.

Crypto tracker

The World Wide Web3 data was listed as of 06:42 a.m. WAT on July 27, 2026. The reported percentage changes were +1.44%, +8.33%, +3.97%, +24.22%, -8.04%, -6.75%, +1.76%, and +6.54%. The source table listed coin name, current value, day, and month, but the coin names and values were not included in the extracted source text.

Job openings

ARM is hiring a Funding Accounting Officer in Lagos, Nigeria.

Scouthappy is hiring a Growth Product Manager for a remote role in Nigeria.

Chowdeck is hiring for several hybrid roles across Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan, Nigeria. The openings include Junior Accounting Associate, Senior Mobile Engineer, Customer Support Representative, Inventory Manager, DevOps Engineer, and multiple other roles.

Binance is hiring a General Manager for West Africa in a remote Africa-based role.

Pesa is hiring a Brand and Content Specialist for a remote role in Nigeria.

Other updates listed by TechCabal include Anne-Kinuthia Otieno, Airtel Money Kenya’s managing director, stepping down; a Digital Nomads feature on Eseandre Otomiewor, who built a $100,000 business and then started over in the United States; a feature titled “The problem was much bigger than we anticipated it to be”: Day 1-1000 of Mida; and a report on communities turning to data collectives for control amid frustration with Big Tech.

The original TechCabal Daily edition was written by Opeyemi Kareem, Zia Yusuf, and Emmanuel Nwosu, and edited by Emmanuel Nwosu and Ganiu Oloruntade.