👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Starlink sets up shop in Guinea-Bissau

In a post made on X, SpaceX’s Starlink has announced the launch of its high-speed internet service in Guinea-Bissau. The announcement makes it Starlink’s 23rd African country. Their rollout pace is giving Usain Bolt. 

Starlink’s availability map, now shows regions like Bissau, Buba, and Gabú, as “available” zones, while other areas are tagged “Waitlist” or “Coming Soon.,”

This is a big deal for Guinea-Bissau, where only 35.2% of the population has internet access. The country’s connectivity is hindered by poor infrastructure, with internet speeds reaching 150 Mbps.

But why is Starlink spreading so fast? The ISP’s launch in Guinea-Bissau comes a few weeks after it launched in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a few months after its expansion to Somalia and Lesotho. Beyond having active operations in 23 African countries, the company is in active negotiations with regulators in at least 10 African nations, including Ethiopia and Senegal. These negotiations often involve securing regulatory licences and addressing local content requirements. Despite its progress, the firm faces resistance in markets like South Africa. 

Still, the addition of 10 countries could push Starlink’s African presence to over 30 nations, operating in over 60% of the continent’s 54 countries. 

A question in everyone’s mind: Why is Starlink spreading so fast? Is Starlink chasing market share, power, or presence, betting on Africa’s 950 million-plus offline population before anyone else does? 

A map of their spread in the continent reveals their playbook: Starlink is aggregating small, high-value pockets across the continent. The company doesn’t have the local penetration to compete with mobile telcos head-on. But by stitching together niche markets across dozens of countries, it can achieve reach and profitability without ever becoming dominant.

On June 13, the European Commission greylisted Kenya, tagging it a high-risk country for remittances and trade partnerships.

That announcement must have rattled President Ruto’s finance cabinet, because the UK-Kenya corridor is one of the country’s top remittance sources. As we explained in this newsletter, the greylisting would have meant that if you’re Kenyan, your relatives abroad—especially in Europe—would be having headaches trying to send you money through SWIFT and other traditional payment methods.

Thankfully, the government has acted swiftly (see what we did there ) to control the situation. On Tuesday, Ruto signed a new law that would strengthen how financial industries carry out anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) compliance.

Don’t let the big words scare you. The new law will simply ensure that financial institutions have a better grip on identifying their customers, how they receive money, and tracing where money comes from. If it’s bad or suspicious, they flag and report. That’s AML/CTF 101.

Kenya is fixing its crypto blindspot. The country is now paying closer attention to the crypto industry. There’s a common joke in crypto circles that “money travels in the air” because it’s hard to tell where funds are coming from or going on the blockchain.

That may be a stretch, but tracing money on the blockchain does take time and effort. Kenya wants crypto companies to skip the hard work by asking customers for full transparency and monitoring transactions from the start.

With this, Kenya is playing its cards according to global standards, hoping the EU will take it off the Greylist.

On the night of June 13, 2025, armed attackers stormed Yelwata, a farming town in Benue State, killing nearly 200 people in their sleep. With machetes and petrol, they razed homes and wiped out entire families. The scale of the violence was horrifying—but it was made even more tragic by the systemic failures that allowed it to happen: collapsed security structures, missing emergency response, and a paralyzed communications network.

A day before the attack, a severed fibre optic line plunged parts of Benue into a communications blackout, cutting off residents from any way to call for help or warn others. In a state already devastated by continuous violence—over 6,800 people killed since 2023—this kind of digital vulnerability can be fatal.

In places like Yelwata, reliable telecom coverage is rare, electricity is unstable, smartphones are few, and many still depend on word-of-mouth or basic feature phones. The lack of connectivity leaves communities dangerously exposed.

With little or no government support, local residents are building their own lifelines: grassroots digital tools for sharing real-time updates, coordinating relief, and issuing warnings. But these efforts struggle against overwhelming odds—lack of funding, poor infrastructure, and government opposition to civilian defence initiatives.

The massacre in Yelwata didn’t just highlight Nigeria’s security crisis. It exposed a deeper truth: in an era where information can save lives, being disconnected isn’t just a disadvantage—it’s a death sentence.

Watch out for Frank Eleanya’s article today to find out more.

Nigerians, it’s official. Telecom companies have announced that starting from June 18, they’d start deducting USSD charges from your airtime—but not without your permission. You’ll be sent a notification to opt in to the service.

If you opt in, you will be charged the regular ₦6.98 fee per 120 seconds of a USSD session. But this time, instead of the actual money in your bank account, your airtime will now foot this. This new method, called “end-user billing,” will take away the oversight from banks and hand it over to telecom operators.

In the previous arrangement, telecom companies provided the USSD technology for banks, and banks charged and remitted the money back to telcos. But this became problematic as banks began to owe telecom operators.

This new arrangement feels right because the telecom companies like MTN and Airtel will now directly collect payments for a service they provide. We know you work hard; how does it feel to get paid for your work without needing to go through a middleman? This is exactly how it is for telcos.

The new method will also prevent double billing. That’s because only telecom companies can now deduct the charge, and banks are no longer involved in collecting fees, so users won’t be charged twice or face hidden deductions.Banks previously faced allegations of charging customers twice due to the lack of transparency in the process. While we can’t confirm those claims, regulators say that switching to airtime deductions will remove that confusion for good.

Zoom out: While the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), which regulates the telecom sector, wanted banks to clear part of the debts they owe telcos first before the launch of the new billing method, there was some misalignment between banks and telcos. Some banks announced that airtime deductions would commence on June 3 instead of the June 18 date which telecom operators announced. It’s unclear if the debt issue was ever fully resolved, but telcos seem to be going ahead with the new plan anyway.

How do you feel about being charged USSD fees from your airtime?