IHS Holding Limited

African policymakers have long said Western institutions' influence over risk perceptions have led to unfairly high funding costs.

MTN, Africa's biggest mobile operator, is one step closer to taking full control of IHS Towers, a telecoms infrastructure company in South Africa.

But regulators are putting guardrails around what the ownership means for its rivals.

The Competition Commission, South Africa's competition regulator, approved a $2.2 billion acquisition on September 30th with conditions requiring IHS infrastructure to remain available to competing operators on fair and non-discriminatory terms, limiting MTN South Africa's ability to benefit from owning infrastructure that rivals also depend on.

Now, none of the 2027 increases is final just yet, and anything above 3.8% will still need to be justified to the council.

So a few years back, MTN sold thousands of its South African cellphone towers to IHS Towers for 6.4 billion rand.

It then pocketed the cash and started paying IHS rents to keep using them.

But you see, now it wants them all back.

It also means that MTN gets a share of all the money that its rival networks pay to use for the same towers, while giving it more control over one of the biggest costs behind running its network.

Now, in saying all of this, the deal isn't done yet, but it has cleared an important hurdle in South Africa.

So the Competition Commission has recommended that it be approved as long as the rival networks continue getting fair access to the IHS towers, and that MTN doesn't get any special treatment.

And so the final decision now sits with the Competition Tribunal.