Letshego Sells Five African Units to Axian as Kenya Waits Behind a Legal Snag

Botswana · DEALS

Letshego sells African units in a sweeping retreat from East and West Africa, signing binding agreements to offload subsidiaries in five countries to Axian Digital Venture Holdings while Kenya waits its turn behind an unresolved legal matter.

Botswana. Letshego Africa Holdings is selling five subsidiaries and shrinking from eleven markets to six. (Photo: Internet reproduction)

Why Letshego sells African units now

Letshego Africa Holdings Limited, the Botswana-listed financial services group, has signed binding sale and purchase agreements to sell 100 per cent of its subsidiaries in Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria. The buyer is Axian Digital Venture Holding and Management Limited, the Dubai-registered acquisition vehicle of Madagascar’s Axian Group.

The transaction, reported at about US$62.7 million or 840 million pula, marks the unwinding of a long-running expansion strategy that once stretched across 11 sub-Saharan countries. Letshego’s board approved the exploration of the sale in the second half of 2025, and by 31 December 2025 the five operations were classified as a “disposal group held for sale” and a “discontinued operation.”

The assets carried a combined market value of 823.9 million pula (about US$59.8 million), and Letshego told shareholders it expects to book a loss of 281.1 million pula (about US$20.4 million) on the sale, with directors saying the price falls within an acceptable valuation range. The reclassification under International Financial Reporting Standard 5 triggered a 570.7 million pula (about US$41.4 million) impairment and a 519.5 million pula (about US$37.7 million) post-tax loss on the portfolio, pushing the group to a consolidated post-tax loss of 235.5 million pula (about US$17.1 million) for the year to 31 December 2025, against a profit of 93.3 million pula (about US$6.8 million) the previous year. Continuing operations tell a different story: they made a 284 million pula (about US$20.6 million) profit, up 362 percent from 61.4 million pula (about US$4.5 million), with net impairments down 77 percent to 124.8 million pula (about US$9.1 million). The headline group loss is an accounting artefact of the assets being reclassified as held for sale.

Why Kenya is next but not yet included

Kenya, where Letshego has operated since acquiring a 62.52 percent stake in Micro Africa in June 2012, is conspicuously absent from the disposal package. The FY2025 annual report says Letshego Kenya Limited “has been excluded from the disposal group due to an ongoing legal consideration required to be closed prior to sale of shares.”

The cleanest reading is that Kenya remains strategically important but is not yet part of the binding agreements. Any characterisation of Kenya as “next” should be understood as a possibility contingent on the legal issue being cleared, not as a confirmed transaction.

Letshego’s Kenya presence was once central to its East African ambitions. A 2021 disclosure listed Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Namibia as active markets with more to follow. Now the direction has reversed, and the group is consolidating back toward its Southern African core.

The money logic behind the retreat

Letshego’s own disclosures paint a picture of a lender battered by foreign exchange fluctuations, inflationary volatility, elevated direct costs and tax pressures in fragile markets. The group flagged global economic fragmentation, geopolitical tensions stemming from the conflict in the Middle East, debt vulnerabilities and climate shocks as material downside risks.

It also said it was stress-testing against US sanctions, anti-immigration policies, aid cuts, tariffs, trade wars and geopolitical tensions. For a microfinance and consumer lender holding local-currency assets while facing foreign-currency funding needs, that combination made peripheral markets increasingly difficult to sustain.

The impairment and the expected loss on sale suggest this is an exit from weaker markets rather than a growth-led sale. Letshego’s management has framed the transaction as a portfolio reset to concentrate on markets where it has stronger scale and returns.

Who is actually buying

Axian Group is not Gulf money. It is a Madagascan group, built by the Hiridjee family, in Madagascar since the 1870s, out of a 1950s textile business called Hirimix and renamed Axian in December 2015. Its chief executive, Hassanein Hiridjee, is Malagasy. The acquiring vehicle is registered in Dubai, but the capital and the management are African.

That matters for how you read the deal. This is not a transfer of an African franchise to an outside buyer; it is consolidation within Africa, with a telecoms-and-fintech group absorbing a consumer lender’s customer base across five markets. Axian’s chief executive of the acquiring vehicle is Erwan Gelebart; Letshego’s group chief executive is Reinette van der Merwe.

What the deal means for East Africa

For Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, the transaction means a change of ownership at a lender that has been part of the microfinance landscape for years. The three East African subsidiaries will move from a Botswana-listed lender to a Madagascan telecoms and financial-services group with pan-African ambitions.

The deal remains subject to regulatory approvals and standard closing conditions in each jurisdiction. Until those are secured, the operational reality on the ground stays unchanged, though the strategic direction has already shifted decisively.

Kenya, the largest economy in the region, remains the unresolved piece. The legal issue blocking its inclusion has not been detailed publicly, but its resolution will determine whether Letshego completes a full exit from East Africa or retains a foothold in Nairobi.

What to watch next

The immediate milestone is regulatory clearance in the five jurisdictions where binding agreements have been signed. Shareholders have already voted. At a general meeting on 19 June 2026 they approved the disposal by a large majority, as required for a Category 1 transaction under Botswana Stock Exchange rules. What remains is clearance from the regulators in each of the five countries.

The Kenya legal matter is the next domino. If resolved, it could bring a sixth subsidiary into the sale, completing Letshego’s retreat from East Africa. If it drags on, Kenya could remain an isolated outpost of a group that has otherwise decisively shrunk its map.

For Axian, the test will be whether it can integrate five separate country operations, stabilise their loan books and deploy its digital platform at scale. The deal gives it an instant presence in markets where building from scratch would have taken years and cost far more than the reported US$62.7 million price tag.

The read-across for Latin America

Consumer lenders that expanded across borders on the promise of scale are retreating almost everywhere, and Latin America has its own version — regional banks that bought into neighbouring markets in the 2010s and are now selling those units to concentrate at home. The economics are the same: a payroll-lending or microfinance book in a market where you are sub-scale rarely earns its cost of capital.

The buyer’s profile is the more interesting signal. A telecoms group taking over a lender’s customer base is the same convergence that has produced Nubank in Brazil and the fintech arms of the Mexican retailers. In both regions the distribution now matters more than the banking licence.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• x.com
• ecofinagency.com
• sundaystandard.info
• linkedin.com

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