👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Orda is up at Moniepoint

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Nigerian fintech unicorn Moniepoint has acquired Orda, a restaurant management platform. Operating across Kenya and Nigeria, Orda powers restaurant operations for major Nigerian chains such as those under the Eat’N’Go group and processes about 5.2 million transactions annually, as of 2024, signalling the platform’s scale. The acquisition will see Orda’s Nigerian operations folded into Moniepoint’s business point-of-sale (PoS) platform, Moniebook, to become Moniebook for Restaurants.

Under the new setup, a cashier records a sale inside the restaurant management software, the customer pays through a Moniepoint terminal, and the system instantly confirms and closes the transaction while generating a receipt that reflects both the sale and payment. 

State of play: Orda is an operating system for restaurants and food businesses that connects how they take orders, process payments, manage inventory, run kitchens, and see analytics in one place, both for dine‑in and all their online channels. It bundles PoS, inventory, microsites/online ordering, basic credit, and reporting so a bukka, quick‑service joint, or franchise can see, in real time, what sold, through which channel, at what cost and margin. 

Moniepoint’s informal‑market play has been to go beyond “just POS” into full business tooling for small merchants: first with Grocel (rebadged as Moniebook) to digitise everyday shopkeeping, then by tightly integrating bookkeeping, payments, and inventory for its agent and SME base. 

Acquiring Orda plugs a mature, food‑vertical operating system into that Moniebook spine, giving Moniepoint instant depth in a large, fragmented restaurant and food‑vendor market, and letting it layer its strengths (payments, banking, credit, analytics) directly on top of daily operational workflows, which is the fastest way to scale usage and lock‑in across informal food businesses.

This is bigger than one acquisition. It is consolidating the scale and escape velocity opportunity in Nigeria’s informal market: from high-value transactions processed by restaurant chains to consistent mid-sized tickets in smaller bukkas. Like its peers all turning 10, it’s an exciting happenstance that Moniepoint, Flutterwave, and Paystack have all made acquisitions this year. 

Does Chowdeck pose a threat? Chowdeck’s 2025 acquisition of Mira, a restaurant PoS and management system, signalled a move to own the same in‑store operating rails that Orda and now Moniepoint are betting on, meaning that if Chowdeck can deeply integrate delivery demand with restaurant operations and (embedded) payments at scale, it becomes a serious competitive counterweight for food businesses deciding whose ecosystem to live in.

Why restaurants are the prize: Large restaurant operations can be messy if not properly managed. A single order can involve multiple menu items, ingredients in inventory, and combos. Now scale that across multiple branches with their own inventory, staff, and demand patterns. It is something Orda was built for, and Moniepoint wants in because if they own that system where transactions happen constantly, they get to sit at the centre of how the business runs.

On March 23, Legend Internet, a Nigerian publicly-listed Internet company, notified the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) of its plans to merge with Spectranet, the country’s largest Internet service provider (ISP) by subscribers. 

The deal will combine Legend’s listed vehicle and growing fibre footprint with Spectranet’s long-standing wireless broadband brand and existing home and SME customer base. For two operators that have been chasing the same urban wallets for years, this is less a surprise than a formal admission that the ISP market is now too expensive to attack solo.

State of play: Nigeria’s broadband market is getting squeezed from every direction: MTN and Airtel are pushing hard into home broadband, fibre players like FibreOne are eating into high‑value urban segments, and Starlink has changed expectations about speed and reliability almost overnight. Mid‑tier ISPs like Spectranet have felt that pressure in their numbers, with subscriber losses and shrinking share, even as overall data demand keeps rising. 

The combined entity has a better shot at relevance: more scale to negotiate backbone and spectrum costs, a bigger combined network to sweat, and one brand to take into new cities instead of two under‑invested ones.

Between the lines: This is also a capital markets story. Legend listed on the NGX in 2025 as a pure broadband play, and its share price has swung around as investors tried to compare it with telcos and fintechs. Bringing Spectranet under that listed umbrella gives the new company a simpler pitch: a bigger national ISP with direct access to equity markets, at a time when small ISPs face stiff competition and raising private money is getting harder. 

It will not fix right‑of‑way issues, high costs, or spectrum fights, and merging two networks and support teams will be messy. But across Africa, ISP markets are consolidating around a few well‑funded players sitting between mobile operators and satellite, and this deal is a clear sign Nigeria is heading there too. The real contest will be who can finance and operate a truly national broadband network, not who can offer the cheapest router in one neighbourhood.

Kenya’s taxman is coming for a sector of its economy that has operated below the country’s value-added tax (VAT) radar for years. 

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) said that small businesses, which were previously exempt from paying VAT for annual turnovers less than KES 5 million ($36,800), will now be liable to register and pay taxes regardless of the amount of their annual turnovers.

Before now, small Kenyan businesses that did not make the turnover cut didn’t have to file monthly tax returns or charge VAT, but that is about to change. Under a new proposal, every business, no matter how small, would be required to register for VAT and remit about 16%.

What does this mean? It means for every sale your neighbourhood trader makes on taxable goods, there will be a 16% general rate they would have to pay. Kenya increases the amount it earns from taxes without increasing the tax percentage from 16%, with this new proposal.

But it also shifts the burden downward. Businesses that were previously too small to worry about compliance now have to issue proper invoices, keep detailed records, and file returns consistently. Which translates to: the end customers will feel the pinch through price increases.

Will this suffocate survival? Small traders operate in price-sensitive environments, where even minor increases can push customers to other traders. Adding VAT on goods could mean either raising prices and risking losing customers, or absorbing the cost and shrinking already-thin margins. None of which is particularly attractive.

Between record fuel prices, a weaker rand in recent weeks, and hiked electricity tariffs being passed through the value chain, South African commuters are trapped in a brutal cost spiral. Petrol and diesel hikes have pushed up taxi fares, while operators themselves are squeezed by higher maintenance, financing, and insurance costs. 

Catch up: GoMetro, a South African e-mobility startup that has been building software and data tools for public transport operators for years, unveiled its eKamva electric minibus taxi in 2024 and has spent the past two years testing it in real-world conditions. Even when global oil softens, currency volatility and taxes blunt any real relief at the pump. That is the backdrop for GoMetro’s move: an electric alternative is a hedge against a fuel-price regime that no longer offers predictable unit economics to taxi owners or passengers.

The company now plans to start running eKamva vehicles on Century City routes in Cape Town, South Africa, from October, working with about 15 taxi associations that move more than 25,000 people daily. The goal is to turn Century City into a fully electric taxi hub within three to four years, using a model where operators finance the chassis traditionally but pay for the battery and energy on a subscription basis. 

The bet: If GoMetro can prove 50–70% savings on energy and lower maintenance on dense urban routes, it has a template it can sell into other South African cities wrestling with the same fuel and cost-of-living crisis.

The hard part now is paying for the switch. GoMetro is still talking to the government about higher taxi recapitalisation grants for operators who go electric, and the eKamva cannot yet handle long-distance routes. The first proof point will be short, urban loops like Century City, where taxis can fast-charge during midday breaks, and operators can see, in rands, whether the savings beat diesel.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade