Unpredictable tax and licensing changes, not regulation itself, pose the single greatest threat to Africa’s gaming industry, Jeremiah Maangi, chief executive of iGaming Afrika, told delegates in the opening keynote of the Enugu Gaming Conference (EGC) 2026, arguing that the continent’s next decade of growth will be won or lost on data, payment infrastructure and policy consistency rather than player numbers alone.
Maangi opened by pushing back on the framing of Africa as merely “the continent of the future,” arguing it is already shaping the present of global digital gaming.
He pointed to Nigeria’s scale, he cited a population of over 230 million, with more than 60% under age 25, alongside rapid urban expansion and falling data costs as evidence the continent has moved straight to mobile-first, bypassing the desktop-to-mobile transition seen in Western markets. UN-based 2026 projections put Nigeria’s population closer to 242 million, still Africa’s largest.
“For millions of young Africans, their smartphone is not just a secondary screen; it is their primary entertainment centre,” Maangi said, arguing operators that win in Africa will be ‘hyper-local’ rather than the ones with the largest marketing budgets.
On payments, Maangi said seamless, instant settlement is as important to gaming platforms as the products themselves, and pointed to a shift across Nigeria and East Africa from outright restriction of digital assets toward structured, compliance-driven oversight.
In Nigeria, President Bola Tinubu signed the Presidential Executive Order on Virtual Assets Coordination, 2026 on July 17, roughly ten days before the conference, establishing a unified framework to govern cryptocurrencies and digital assets, with a Virtual Asset Council chaired by the Central Bank of Nigeria coordinating oversight alongside the Nigeria Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In Kenya, the Central Bank gazetted the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Regulations, 2026 under Legal Notice No. 134, establishing licensing requirements, stricter anti-money-laundering controls and consumer-protection standards for cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet providers serving Kenyan customers.
Maangi said South Africa has taken a broadly similar route, folding digital assets into its existing financial oversight through service-provider licensing, tax enforcement and exchange controls.
“Africa is already smelling the coffee,” he told delegates, framing the shift as a operational opportunity: under strict AML and know-your-customer controls, assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum could cut cross-border transaction costs, remove settlement delays with international suppliers, and serve as a deposit-and-withdrawal channel for players.
But he cautioned against treating adoption as the goal in itself, “our goal must be to build trusted digital financial ecosystems that can actually support our industry,” he said.
Turning to regulation, Maangi said the increasing willingness of African governments to license and monitor gaming is “a good thing” and “the greatest catalyst” for the industry, not its enemy, clear rules build the market confidence that attracts institutional investment, tech jobs and local supply chains.
The bigger risk, he said, is policy volatility: sudden tax increases between budget cycles, overlapping licensing structures, or multiple jurisdictions creating double taxation.
“Everybody loses,” he said, compliant operators cannot plan multi-year investment, global partners delay or withdraw, and unlicensed black-market operators thrive in the resulting uncertainty.
Maangi was careful to frame this as a case for predictability, not deregulation.
“This is not a call” for lighter-touch regulation or zero taxation, he said; responsible operators want to pay their fair share and fund local sports development and community initiatives. What the industry needs from regulators and policymakers”, he said, is consistency.
He pointed to consumer-protection frameworks, self-exclusion registers and anti-money-laundering protocols in the UK, Asia and the US as models worth studying, while warning against copying them wholesale rather than adapting them to African market realities.
Maangi’s closing argument centred on data. Gaming-market data across Africa remains fragmented, he said: operators hold internal player-retention and drop-off metrics, payment gateways hold transaction volumes, and regulators hold licensing rosters and tax receipts, leaving researchers and policymakers to work with limited real-time figures.
“Data is not just a collection of numbers in a spreadsheet. Data is economic infrastructure,” he said, adding that iGaming Afrika intends to invest in data providers, regulatory-technology firms and analytics platforms alongside consumer-facing operators.
He closed by calling for an African gaming industry anchored in evidence rather than assumption:
“When we anchor our decisions in data rather than assumptions, everyone wins.”
