The COMESA Competition and Consumer Commission has cleared Vodacom Group’s Sh272 billion bid to raise its stake in Safaricom from 35 percent to 55 percent, handing the South African telecoms giant majority control of Kenya’s dominant operator and removing the most significant regulatory barrier to a deal that reshapes ownership of the country’s most strategically important company.
Vodacom is acquiring a 15 percent stake from the Government of Kenya and a further five percent from parent company Vodafone Group, priced at Sh34 per share. The COMESA panel concluded the transaction would not substantially prevent competition across the 21-member Common Market and was not contrary to public interest. Kenya’s Competition Authority of Kenya chose not to conduct a full domestic review, determining instead that the deal crossed regional thresholds requiring supranational assessment, a departure from the parallel national-and-regional scrutiny that major Kenyan transactions have historically faced. For Kenya’s government, the deal represents a meaningful partial exit from a long-held strategic asset, freeing capital at a time when the Treasury is under acute fiscal pressure. For Safaricom’s roughly 40 million subscribers, majority Vodacom ownership signals tighter alignment with the group’s continental strategy, with potential implications for M-Pesa’s international expansion, network investment priorities and the pricing dynamics of Kenya’s mobile money and data markets.
One regulatory gate remains open. The East African Community Competition Authority is conducting its own review under the EAC Competition Act, which only became operational in November 2025. The Safaricom transaction is the first merger inquiry processed under the new Act, making it a live test of how the EAC and COMESA coordinate on deals that cross both jurisdictions simultaneously.
The Bigger Picture Safaricom is not simply Kenya’s largest telco. It is the infrastructure layer on which a significant share of the country’s digital economy runs, from M-Pesa payments processing the equivalent of roughly half of Kenya’s GDP annually, to the data networks supporting the startup and fintech ecosystem that has made Nairobi one of Africa’s leading tech hubs. Vodacom gaining majority control means strategic decisions about that infrastructure, including capital allocation, product direction and regional expansion, will now be taken from Johannesburg rather than Nairobi. Whether that shift accelerates Safaricom’s continental reach or introduces tensions with Kenya’s national technology ambitions will depend heavily on how Vodacom exercises the control it has just been cleared to hold.
Source: Business Daily Africa
