Coding Against the Laws: Why Our Neighbors' New Tech Rules Hurt the Guys in the Trenches

I spent the last three days tracking down a memory leak in our background workers, only to look up from my VS Code terminal and see our neighbors in Ghana and Kenya pulling off some of the wildest policy acrobatics I’ve seen this year.

As a developer who actually builds things, I find it hard enough to keep a Postgres database optimized and handle API rate limits without having to worry about whether a new law will suddenly make my foreign-funded hosting setup illegal. But here we are.

While we are here in Lagos and Akure trying to survive the latest round of fuel price hikes and keeping our generators running, our tech cousins across the continent are facing some serious headwinds from the people in power.

Ghana's Jekyll and Hyde Act

In Accra, they did something amazing last month. They scrapped the annoying USD 500k minimum capital requirement for foreign-owned businesses. I was almost ready to pop a bottle of cold Malt. If you’ve ever tried to pitch an investor or set up an entity, you know how much of a barrier that kind of money is.

But just as we were about to celebrate, they tucked Section 37 into a draft bill.

This new rule says that if you build a SaaS product, host cloud infrastructure, run a data center, or build digital tools for government partnerships, your company must be "wholly owned by a citizen."

Think about that for a second. If you are a Ghanaian founder working from a coffee shop in Accra, and you raise even $50k from a foreign accelerator or a syndication group in the US to pay for your AWS bills and hire two backend devs, you are no longer "wholly owned by a citizen."

Does that mean you can't get a license to host your app? Are they going to force everyone to run on local servers that might not even have 99% uptime?

It makes no sense. You cannot build modern software in a silo. We rely on global infrastructure, global capital, and global collaboration. Trying to lock out foreign equity in the SaaS space is like building a local database but refusing to use indexes because they weren't invented in your hometown.

Kenya’s Tax Net is Tangling the Code

Then you look at Kenya. Their new Finance Bill is aiming for a 15% capital gains tax on offshore sales where the company's value is derived from Kenya.

Now, I’m not a tax lawyer. I’m a guy who writes code and occasionally looks at cap sheets. But every single founder I know who has managed to raise seed money has had to set up a holding company in Delaware or London. It’s not because they want to dodge local taxes. It’s because the foreign investors who hold the bags of money will literally refuse to wire a single dollar into a local bank account without that structure. It's about safety for them.

If Kenya starts taxing offshore restructurings, internal cleanups, and group reorganizations, they are going to make it a nightmare for startups to even clean up their cap tables before a funding round.

We already have enough "Sapa" to deal with. If you make it harder for investors to exit or even move equity around, they will simply take their money somewhere else. Maybe they'll go to Asia, or maybe they’ll just keep their money in safe US Treasury bonds.

The View from My Desk

When you're sitting in a shared workspace in Gbagada, or debugging your code in a cold room in Jos, you don't care about "national sovereignty" buzzwords. You care about whether your API calls are returning a 200 OK, whether you can pay your team this month, and if you can get enough runway to build the next feature.

We already "no gree for anybody" on a daily basis just to keep our internet connected and our laptops charged. We don't need our governments adding extra lines of broken code to our business models.

If we want African tech to actually scale past these early stages, the policymakers need to stop drafting bills in airtight, air-conditioned offices without talking to the guys actually writing the code.

Let us build. Let the money flow. We have enough bugs to fix already.