👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Folded by a paper cut

Mpact, a South African packaging company, plans to shut down its Springs paper mill, a facility that has been using recycled fibre to produce cartonboard for industrial use. While the plant will remain operational until existing orders are finalised in May, about 377 workers are set to lose their jobs.

There’s more: This decision triggered a Section 189A process, a formal consultation procedure under South African labour law that companies must follow before large-scale retrenchments.

Here’s what is surprising and not so surprising: The mill wasn’t losing money. In 2025, it made R2 million ($120,000) in operating profit, down more than 93% from R32 million ($1.9 million) the previous year. It remained profitable, but only just.

Imports are cheaper, so that’s a problem for Springs Mill. The Mpact-owned mill produces cartonboard, the stiff paper used to make boxes and packaging, but globally, there’s currently too much cartonboard supply. In 2024, the global paperboard market produced approximately 464 million metric tons across over a thousand mills. 

Thanks to this oversupply, Mpact has realised that customers can import cartonboard about 20% cheaper than what the Springs Mill can produce locally. This gap became fatal when the plant’s largest customer decided to switch to imports earlier this year.

What happens to South Africa’s cartonboard industry? The Springs Mill is South Africa’s only domestic cartonboard producer. If it closes, the country could become almost entirely dependent on imports for this material, exposing industrial manufacturers who use cartonboards for packaging, including for toiletries, perfumes, cosmetics, or chocolate, to currency swings and global supply disruptions without a local producer they can fall back on.

It is up to anyone’s guess why a government-run post office is still operational in 2026, but the South African one now wants to be your e-commerce and fintech partner too.

The South African Post Office (SAPO) survives today because of its universal service mandate: 260 of its 657 branches sit in rural and underserved areas where no private courier wants to go, and it still handles government mail for courts, police, hospitals, and state departments. It also holds a legal monopoly over basic letters, postcards and small parcels under 1 kg until regulators unwind that.

Yet, that monopoly has not translated into a healthy business. SAPO has been in business rescue since July 2023 and needed R150 million ($9 million) from the Communications Ministry and another R381 million ($23 million) from a labour‑relief scheme in 2025 just to keep paying salaries and day‑to‑day costs, signalling that the post office remained a loss-making business.

Against that backdrop, Communications Minister Solly Malatsi is pitching a pivot. An amended Post Office Act (2024) now allows SAPO to diversify into e-commerce fulfilment, logistics, financial services, and digital government platforms. 

A multi‑stakeholder task team with National Treasury, the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), a development finance institution, and business‑rescue practitioners is pushing a public–private partnership mode, where a Request for Information (RFI), an open call for private companies to pitch ideas on how they could partner with SAPO across logistics, ecommerce, fintech and digital services, was issued in December 2025. It pulled in 120 proposals from 95 potential partners, and those responses will now kickstart a formal procurement process to bring private money and capability into SAPO’s turnaround.

The timing is not random: South Africa’s online retail sector hit at least R130 billion ($7.85 billion) in 2025, growing more than ten times faster than physical retail, with platforms like Takealot, Amazon South Africa, and Checkers Sixty60 setting the pace.

Between the lines: The problem is that SAPO is trying to join a race it can barely walk to. At the same time, the minister is talking about e-commerce ambitions, he has also moved to strip SAPO’s 25-year monopoly on sub-1 kg parcel deliveries, a category that is basically the bread and butter of online shopping logistics. Losing that exclusivity will likely hurt SAPO’s parcel dominance. 

The government is simultaneously telling SAPO to compete in e-commerce while removing the one structural advantage it had in that space. Whether that is bold reform or a slow funeral with extra steps depends on how quickly those 95 private partners actually show up with money—or a plan.

Multiple reports have highlighted Kenyans’ emerging road rage issues and the alarming rate at which boda boda (motorcycle) riders are now involved in incidents. For years, regulators have remained quiet, and all indications that anything was going to change were mostly performative. 

But now, Kenya’s transport regulator wants to restore order. If you’re a Kenyan motorist with a frequent urge to play out a scene from the Fast & Furious movies in real life, you need to think twice.

The National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) launched a digital portal that automatically detects road offences and sends violation notices to motorists by SMS. 

Why Kenya is going digital on traffic: The system is tackling road safety and corruption, as interactions between motorists and traffic police have been a flashpoint for bribery complaints. 

How would violators be caught? The system relies on roadside surveillance cameras that monitor highways and major junctions that read the vehicle’s number plate when it captures a violation, links it to registration records, and logs the offence. After a few moments, the registered owner receives a message about what violation they committed, where it happened, and how much it will cost.

Consequences… consequences: The platform tracks 37 different traffic offences, from relatively minor violations to more serious ones, like speeding, running red lights, driving without number plates, or causing obstruction on the road. Violators have seven days to pay fines, which range from KES 500 ($3.90) to KES 10,000 ($78), through designated banking channels linked to the system.

“But you can just ignore the message.” No. Late payments attract interest, and unpaid fines could block motorists from accessing services, like licence renewal or vehicle transfers. So yes, that unread SMS could come back to haunt you. Yet, will this be enough to deter road offenders?

Why Kenya is going digital on traffic: The system is tackling road safety and corruption, as interactions between motorists and traffic police have been a flashpoint for bribery complaints. While the transport agency says the “fully automated” system will remove every human interaction that could be points of failure, such as bribery or records forgery, the poser here will be implementation and how easily accused offenders can dispute false claims recorded digitally.

Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Emmanuel Nwosu

Edited by: Emmanuel Nwosu & Ganiu Oloruntade