I keep coming back to two stories that landed in the same seven days and, taken together, feel like a warning nobody's treating as one.
Story one: Uber pulled out of Nigeria and Uganda entirely. Thousands of drivers in Lagos and Kampala just stopped getting ride requests, offered a one-off goodwill payment on the way out. This is Uber's fourth African market exit in about a year, after Côte d'Ivoire and Tanzania, plus it already killed budget UberX in South Africa. The company's own framing was a vague "review of business priorities," but the actual pattern underneath every one of these exits is driver protests over earnings, rising costs, and platforms and drivers eventually reaching a point where the relationship just breaks.
Story two, same week: Kenya's High Court struck down the 2022 rule that capped how much commission platforms like Uber and Bolt could charge drivers, at 18%. Struck it down as unconstitutional, along with some data collection rules. The government's got 12 months to redo the regulation properly, with actual public participation this time. Until then, platforms have pricing flexibility they haven't had in years, and nobody knows if commissions creep back up toward the 25-30% range that was apparently normal before 2022.
So here's my problem with the timing. The entire reason an 18% commission cap existed in the first place was to protect driver earnings from exactly the kind of squeeze that's been driving Uber out of market after market across the continent. It wasn't a random bureaucratic rule, it was a direct response to the same tension: drivers feeling like platforms take too much, platforms saying costs are what they are, and eventually somebody loses. In Nigeria and Uganda, the platform lost, or at least decided leaving was cheaper than fixing it. Kenya just removed the exact rule that was supposed to keep that same dynamic from playing out on its own roads, in the same week the rest of the continent showed what happens when nothing's keeping it in check.
I want to be fair to the court here, because striking the rule down wasn't necessarily wrong on the law. If the process behind the 2022 regulation genuinely skipped proper public participation, that's a real constitutional problem regardless of whether the underlying 18% number was good policy. Courts rule on process and constitutionality, not on which outcome sounds nicer. That's a legitimate, defensible ruling on its own terms.
But legitimate process doesn't erase the practical gap it creates. For the next 12 months, Kenya has no cap, no data rules, nothing, while the government works out something better. And it's doing that experiment at the exact moment a very visible, very recent example exists next door of what happens when drivers feel squeezed past their limit. If commissions do creep back up toward 25-30% during this window, Kenyan drivers are watching Nigerian and Ugandan drivers get shown the door as their cautionary tale in real time, not some abstract worst case.
What I'd actually want to see, if I were sitting in Kenya's transport ministry right now, is some kind of voluntary interim commitment from Uber and Bolt not to just quietly push commissions back up during this gap, purely as a goodwill gesture while the real regulation gets written. I doubt that happens, because nothing in how these platforms have operated across the continent this year suggests restraint is the instinct anyone reaches for first. But if commissions do drift up over the next few months and Kenyan drivers start making the same noises Nigerian and Ugandan drivers were making before Uber left, nobody should be shocked. The blueprint for how this goes wrong was published the same week the protection against it got taken away.