The appointment of PwC as administrator is the first formal step in dealing with a collapse that had already played out.

Muniu Thoithi and George Weru of PwC were appointed joint administrators on February 1 under the Insolvency Act 2015. 

From that point, control of the company’s assets and decisions moved away from management. 

“The primary objective of administration proceedings is to allow Administrators to explore ways of rescuing the company as a going concern where feasible or achieving a better outcome for the creditors of the company than would be in the case of a liquidation,” the notice said.

By the time PwC arrived, the damage was already visible. On January 31, more than 700 employees were laid off as Koko’s fuel distribution slowed and, in many areas, stopped. 

Customers in low-income neighbourhoods who depended on the company’s ethanol refills were left without supply. 

At its peak, Koko served between 1.3 and 1.5 million households through about 3,000 automated fuel shops in Kenya and Rwanda, though the Rwanda operation had been paused earlier.

What finally broke the business was regulatory. Koko had spent months seeking a Letter of Authorisation that would allow it to sell carbon credits internationally. 

Those talks were described by people close to the company as “going well” until last week, when a senior official rejected the application and “trashed every progress” made. 

That decision shut the door on carbon revenues that investors had tied to more than $300 million in equity, debt and guarantees.

Without that income, the numbers no longer worked. Koko sold two-burner smart stoves at KES 1,950 ($16), far below cost, and kept fuel prices as low as KES 30 ($0.23). Carbon credits were meant to carry the loss. They never came.

Pressure had been building long before the final decision. In April 2024, Kenya’s Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority suspended bio-ethanol imports. 

Koko was forced to rely on a more expensive local supply, which disrupted logistics and tightened margins. By late 2025, fuel shortages had become frequent, even as the company tried to keep its network running.

Big names backed the expansion. Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Verod-Kepple, Mirova, Rand Merchant Bank and the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, which provided a $179.6 million guarantee, all supported the company at different stages.

PwC now faces the options of assessing whether any part of the Koko Networks business can be rescued, or winding it down in a way that returns more to creditors than liquidation would. 

Creditors have been given 14 days to submit claims.

Shoyinka Shodunke, chief information officer of MTN Nigeria, said this as he delivered the keynote on the digital economy forecast for 2026 at Tech Revolution Africa Conference 2.0 in Lagos, headlined by MTN. 

Speaking under the theme “The Big Bold Step,” Shodunke stressed that the fourth industrial revolution is the first moment in history where Africa can compete on equal terms, but only if it moves fast.

“The inputs today are data, and where’s the factory? The factory sits in the cloud,” he said.

During the first industrial revolution, the continent was absent. In the second, it supplied raw materials. In the third, it became a consumer of finished technology. Each delay came at a cost.

“We got punished for the first. Got punished for the second time. We got punished for the third,” he said. “But in the fourth, if we fail to act, we get punished again.”

What makes this era different, he explained, is that scale no longer depends on capital. With cloud services, access to talent from anywhere and locally generated data, the limitations are lower. Startups no longer need massive data centres or years of runway before launching products.

“You can subscribe to cloud services today at $50,” he said. “You don’t have to invest over $100,000 on compute power for you to be able to power your industry.”

Shodunke explained that the actual threat is not lack of technology but fear, fear of disrupting existing business models, revenue streams and comfortable ways of working. He warned that organisations clinging to legacy systems risk repeating Africa’s old mistakes.

“You cannot live with a legacy mindset, a fear of disruption, or with the comfort of mediocrity,” Shodunke further stated at the Tech Revolution Africa Conference 2.0. “Whatever is being built has to be built with a scale in mind, not mediocre.”

Using MTN as a case study, he described how the telecoms giant has had to intentionally disrupt itself, moving beyond voice and data into cloud services, fintech and intelligent platforms layered on top of its network infrastructure.

“History punished everyone who hesitated,” he warned. “So don’t really wait for the perfect time to come in, only take that big bold step.”

In closing, he stressed that the race has already started. Africa is not arriving late anymore, but hesitation could still leave it watching others disrupt.

“Revolution,” Shodunke said, “it punishes hesitations.”