GBSH Consult Group

09/10/2026

outh African Capital Is Going Deeper Into East Africa

South Africa’s economic footprint across East Africa has been strong for decades. From telecoms and banking to insurance, investment and pharmaceuticals, companies from the Cape have become deeply embedded in the region’s economic infrastructure.

In 2026, that influence continues to grow.

📡 MTN — 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇷🇼 Rwanda | 🇸🇸 South Sudan
MTN Uganda generated about $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and serves roughly 21 million customers. MTN remains one of Africa’s largest telecom and mobile-money groups.

📡 Vodacom — 🇹🇿 Tanzania | 🇰🇪 Kenya
Vodacom Tanzania serves more than 27 million customers. In Kenya, Vodacom now controls 55% of Safaricom, following its latest transaction. Safaricom generated about $3.2 billion in FY2026 revenue.

🏦 Standard Bank/Stanbic — 🇰🇪 Kenya | 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇹🇿 Tanzania | 🇸🇸 South Sudan
One of the deepest South African banking footprints in the region, spanning retail, corporate and investment banking.

🏦 Absa — 🇰🇪 Kenya | 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇹🇿 Tanzania
A major player in corporate, commercial, retail and investment banking across the three markets.

🏦 Nedbank/NCBA — 🇰🇪 Kenya | 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇹🇿 Tanzania | 🇷🇼 Rwanda
Nedbank is pursuing a $842 million acquisition of 66% of NCBA, giving it a major platform across East Africa.

💰 Sanlam — 🇰🇪 Kenya | 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇹🇿 Tanzania | 🇷🇼 Rwanda
Insurance, investments, retirement and wealth management.

💰 Old Mutual — 🇰🇪 Kenya | 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇹🇿 Tanzania | 🇷🇼 Rwanda | 🇸🇸 South Sudan
Insurance, savings and investment services.

💊 Aspen Pharmacare — 🇰🇪 Kenya | 🇺🇬 Uganda | 🇹🇿 Tanzania
A major pharmaceutical presence through Beta Healthcare and Shelys.

One important footnote: MultiChoice is no longer South African-owned. Canal+ completed its takeover in 2025, although DStv and GOtv remain major East African media platforms.

There is no single audited figure for the combined East African value of these companies because they report to their regional operations differently.

But the footprint is clear: billions of dollars in economic activity, billions more in assets and investments, tens of millions of customers, and thousands of direct and indirect jobs.

This is not South Africa “owning” East Africa.

It is South African capital remaining one of the strongest external corporate forces shaping the region’s financial, digital and commercial economy.

08/10/2026

How Africa Moves Her Money 🌍💳
Africa may be one continent, but our payment ecosystems tell very different stories.

🇳🇬 Nigeria: FinTech and multiple payment rails are driving growth, with MoMo PSB, OPay, Moniepoint, MTN MoMo and PalmPay among the leading finance apps.

🇰🇪 Kenya: M-PESA remains the everyday payment powerhouse, supported by Airtel Money, Equity Mobile, Pesapal and NCBA Mobile. Mobile-money subscriptions reached 54.0M in June 2026.

🇿🇦 South Africa: Bank apps are scaling, with Capitec, FNB, Standard Bank and Absa prominent, while cash still represents 56% of consumer transactions by volume.

🇪🇬 Egypt: Instant payments are accelerating through InstaPay, with approximately 1.5B instant payment transactions in 2024.

The bigger lesson is clear: different countries, different rails, different customer behaviours but the same opportunity to make financial services more accessible, seamless and trusted.

Africa isn't just moving money. She is redesigning how money moves.

🤔 As Africa adopts different ways of moving money, how do we build payment ecosystems that are not only faster and smarter, but also more trusted and inclusive for the customer?

06/10/2026

"Africa is not short of resources. It is short of the architecture that ensures those resources serve Africa."

At the Pan African Game Changers Summit in Gaborone last month, GBSH Group Executive Chairman, H.E. Prof. Ambassador Tal Edgars, PhD, delivered the opening keynote to an audience of African leaders, governance practitioners, and change agents from across the continent.

His message was unambiguous. Africa has constitutions. It has courts. It has AfCFTA. What it lacks is the institutional architecture to convert those commitments into daily operational reality for ordinary citizens. Africa does not lack vision. It lacks institutional memory. It lacks the discipline to protect sound policy from the disruption of political transition. The resource curse is never about the resource. It is about the absence of systems that capture, retain, and redirect value for the benefit of citizens.

The Africa we are working to build is not waiting for external rescue. It is being built by Africans who understand that governance is the foundation of everything else. Not governance as ceremony. Governance as delivery. Continental integration is not a sandwich declaration. It becomes real when finance ministries, customs authorities, and border agencies act on what heads of state signed.

Africa's youth is not a burden. It is a civilisational asset. But without the right systems and skills, demographic potential does not become prosperity. It becomes pressure.

There is leadership. And there is misleadership. Africa can no longer afford to confuse the two.

18/09/2026

Government procurement should be the most powerful tool for local
economic development that any African government has.

Across the continent, governments move approximately $700 billion
through procurement every year. Directed deliberately, that spending
could anchor local supply chains, develop small and medium
enterprises, and create the kind of formal employment that a genuine
demographic dividend requires.

Instead, across most African markets, government procurement has
become a trap. Late payment cycles that run to 90, 120, 180 days.
Compliance requirements calibrated for large corporations. Tender
processes where relationships determine outcomes before documents are
submitted.

The procurement trap is the mechanism by which the state becomes, in
practice, the most reliable extractor of value from the local
enterprises it should be building.

GBSH Consult Group advises governments on procurement reform and
enterprises on survival within procurement environments that were not
designed for them.

17/09/2026

Here is where most African organisational strategies actually fail.

Not in the boardroom where the strategy is conceived. Not on the front
line where it is delivered. But in the middle, in the management
layer that has to take what the executive team decided and turn it
into something the organisation can actually execute.

Middle managers are the most undertrained and underinvested leadership
cohort in most African organisations. And yet they run the meetings,
manage the people, absorb pressure from above, and protect teams
below. They are the connective tissue of every organisation.

When that tissue is weak, when middle managers have been promoted for
technical competence rather than leadership capability, when they have
never been given frameworks for managing performance or communicating
strategy; the gap between intention and outcome becomes structural.

Most organisations respond by refining the strategy. GBSH Consult
Group responds by developing the people whose job it is to execute it.
Because the strategy was rarely the problem.

15/09/2026

Here is a number that deserves far more attention than it receives in
African economic policy circles.

In 2023, African diaspora remittances totalled approximately $100
billion. In the same year, total foreign direct investment into Africa
was roughly $48 billion.

The people who know Africa best are moving more than twice as much
money into the continent as the entire formal global investment
community and they are doing it through informal channels because
the formal investment vehicles have not been built with them in mind.

This is the Remittance Paradox. And it represents one of the most
significant untapped opportunities in African economic development:
converting the world's most knowledgeable Africa investors from
welfare providers into equity partners.

GBSH Consult Group advises governments and financial institutions on
building the diaspora investment frameworks that make this conversion
possible.

11/09/2026

We greatly support the PAGC Summit as our GEC, His Excellency Prof. Ambassador Tal Edgars will be delivering a keynote worth your attendance. https://youtu.be/_pK-DuwJ6Jk?si=E2E6oALg5XWkl6sx

Africa trades best with Africa and the trade deals are signed off in Botswana! The 2026 Pan African Game Changers Summit is your gateway to cross‑border partnerships, intra‑African trade, and business opportunities that strengthen our continent. From judges to entrepreneurs, investors to innovators, leaders are gathering in to unlock deals and shape Africa’s economic future. Seats are limited — secure your ticket today - Call: +26772369043 / https://wa.me/message/VVAAEXN6J2TVN1 / Email: [email protected] | Visit www.panafricangamechangers.org and be part of Africa’s rising business movement!

11/09/2026

Most governance failures do not begin with fraud.

They begin with a board that stopped asking difficult questions —
because the culture, the composition, or the dynamics of the room made
difficult questions unwelcome.

Board capture is the process by which this happens: gradually, through
appointments that prioritise loyalty over competence, through
chair-CEO relationships that blur accountability, through audit
committees that receive reports without interrogating them.

By the time it becomes visible in a regulatory finding, a
shareholder revolt, or a financial restatement, the damage is already
structural.

GBSH Consult Group works with boards, shareholders, and executives
across Africa to build the governance architecture that prevents
capture before it takes hold. Because the board that catches the
problem early is the board that was never captured in the first place.

10/09/2026

“In Africa, by Africa, for Africa” sounds like a slogan.

In AI, it may be a safety requirement.

I was reading GSMA’s Mobile Economy Africa 2026 report — from the global association behind MWC — and one detail stayed with me: the African continent has over 2,000 languages, most of them still largely absent from global AI systems.

That is not just a language gap.

It is a trust gap.

People do not describe fear, fraud, conflict, payment issues, family emergencies, or safety incidents in “translated English.” They use the words that feel precise in their own language — with all the hesitation, hierarchy, humour, and context around them.

If AI misses that, it may still answer.

But it will not fully understand.

This is why GSMA’s work with Airtel, Axian Telecom, Ethio Telecom, MTN, Orange, and Vodacom matters. At MWC Barcelona 2026, the initiative demonstrated its first open Swahili reasoning model.

Not as a nice localisation layer.

As infrastructure.

Mobile already contributed $240bn to Africa’s economy in 2025. Operators are projected to invest $76bn in network capex by 2030.

But the real question is not only where the money goes.

It is whether the systems being built can understand and protect the people they are meant to serve.

That is where AI in African markets gets serious: language, identity, and safety — built into the infrastructure from the start.

08/09/2026

🇰🇪 Kenya just ranked 4th in the world.

In H1 2026, the Nairobi Securities Exchange PLC all share index returned +26.77% , outpacing the NASDAQ, FTSE 100, DAX, and India’s SENSEX.

The only markets ahead? South Korea, Nigeria, and Japan.

While developed markets stalled, two African exchanges landed in the global top 4.

The best-performing markets of 2026 aren’t where most people are looking. 📈