South Africa’s Competition Commission is holding private talks with the telecoms industry about relaxing the M&A rules that have defined its assessment of the sector for years, according to people familiar with the discussions. The conversations represent a potential inflection point for a market that has preserved its competitive structure at the cost of the infrastructure investment needed to build out 5G and AI-capable networks at scale. MTN Group, Africa’s largest mobile operator, is the most vocal voice for change. Telkom, which runs Africa’s biggest fibre optic network, is the most obvious consequence.
The shift under discussion is not a deregulatory sweep. It is a specific reconsideration of how the Competition Commission weighs the tradeoff between operator headcount — the standard measure of market competition — and network investment capacity, the metric that determines whether a country can actually build the infrastructure underpinning a digital economy. South Africa currently has four mobile network operators: MTN, Vodacom, Telkom, and Rain. The commission has historically treated that number as an indicator of competitive health. MTN’s argument is that it is the wrong indicator when the goal is 5G build-out.
Ralph Mupita’s Case
“Those are the conversations we are having with regulators and policymakers, so that South Africa can avoid Europe’s underinvestment,” MTN CEO Ralph Mupita said, drawing a direct comparison to the European telecoms market, where decades of strict competition rules preserved operator plurality at the expense of network investment. European operators now lag the US and Asia on 5G coverage, a gap the European Commission is only beginning to address through proposed merger facilitation for cross-border telecoms consolidation. Mupita, who chairs GSMA — the global mobile industry association — has been making this case to regulators not just in South Africa but across the continent.
The analytical frame he is deploying is not new in telecoms policy circles but has gained significant traction since the US and China demonstrated that concentrated market structures — AT&T and Verizon; China Mobile and China Telecom — did not prevent 5G build-out and may have enabled it. The question is whether that model translates to a market with South Africa’s income distribution, where the risk of concentrated operator power falling on low-income consumers is not theoretical.
The Telkom Question
Telkom is the asset that MTN’s consolidation argument most directly points to. The company is South Africa’s third-largest mobile network — and Africa’s largest fibre optic network operator, a position that gives it critical passive infrastructure at a moment when fibre-to-the-home and fibre backhaul for 5G are the central bottlenecks to broadband expansion. Telkom is also partly government-owned, a complication that adds a political economy dimension to any acquisition analysis.
MTN and Telkom held serious acquisition talks in 2022. The talks collapsed over Competition Commission concerns — specifically, the expectation that a combined entity would not receive approval without divestitures that undermined the deal’s industrial logic. The idea resurfaced in 2025 as MTN sought to bulk up its fibre infrastructure, and the current Competition Commission private discussions may represent the first time the regulatory environment is actually shifting in a way that makes the transaction structurally viable.
Mupita has confirmed interest in South African acquisitions “in the medium-to-long-term,” language that is deliberately non-committal but directionally clear to anyone who has followed MTN’s infrastructure strategy. If the Competition Commission signals a willingness to approve a major telecom consolidation — with conditions focused on investment commitments and service quality floors rather than operator headcount — Telkom’s government ownership makes it a complex but not impossible target.
The Regulatory Paradox
The South African telecom M&A story sits alongside a sharply different competition story that BETAR has been tracking this week: the COMESA Competition Commission’s investigation into Meta, targeting the WhatsApp Business API restrictions that lock out third-party AI. The juxtaposition is instructive. Africa’s competition authorities are simultaneously tightening rules for digital platform gatekeepers and considering loosening rules for infrastructure operators. These positions are not contradictory — they reflect a coherent, if not yet fully articulated, industrial policy framework that distinguishes between platform dominance (bad, because it forecloses competitive applications) and infrastructure scale (potentially good, because it enables universal coverage).
South Africa’s Competition Commission has been among the continent’s most active enforcers on the platform side: the Market Inquiry into Digital Markets produced binding conditions on Google and Meta, requiring interoperability and restricting self-preferencing in the South African market. The same commission is now in private talks about whether the rules that kept four mobile networks competing in the South African market have cost the country the infrastructure investment it needs. Being rigorous on platforms while being pragmatic on infrastructure is a defensible position. Whether the commission can articulate and operationalise that distinction without creating a precedent that blurs both directions is the harder challenge.
What Reform Would Actually Look Like
South Africa’s 5G build-out has been constrained by more than M&A rules. The ICASA spectrum auction — delayed by years of litigation — was a significant bottleneck that directly affected operators’ ability to deploy 5G infrastructure regardless of their scale. The SA 5G coverage rate reached approximately 38% by 2023, still below the targets set in the government’s South Africa Connect 2.0 broadband plan. Investment in network infrastructure has been uneven across operators, with Vodacom and MTN having broadly maintained capex rates while Rain and Telkom have faced balance sheet constraints.
Meaningful M&A reform would likely involve shifting the Competition Commission’s merger assessment framework to weigh network investment commitments — specific capex targets tied to coverage milestones — as a pro-competitive factor that can offset concerns about operator concentration. Some precedent exists in European and Australian merger decisions, where regulators have accepted investment undertakings as remedies for concentration concerns. Whether South Africa’s commission is willing to adopt that approach, and whether it can structure enforcement mechanisms that make investment commitments binding rather than aspirational, is the practical question behind the current private talks.
For South Africa’s digital economy ambitions — and for the tech startups and enterprises that depend on high-capacity mobile infrastructure for cloud services, AI applications, and digital commerce — the outcome matters significantly. The Competition Commission has a record of serious institutional rigour on competition questions. The 5G investment question is asking it to apply that rigour to a more complex tradeoff than operator headcount. The private talks are a signal that the institution is at least willing to engage with the question. Whether they produce a framework change, or simply clarify that the existing rules will apply as written, is what MTN — and Telkom, and the South African digital economy — is waiting to find out.
— Technology Desk, BETAR.africa
