For the better part of a decade, the conventional wisdom in African telecoms was clear and almost dogma: owning thousands of steel towers was not the smartest use of a mobile operator’s capital.
Sell the masts to specialist infrastructure companies, lease the capacity back, and free up balance-sheet firepower for spectrum, 4G and 5G rollouts, customer acquisition and the shiny new digital services that actually move the needle with subscribers. It was an elegant, asset-light model that many operators, including MTN, embraced with enthusiasm.
Now Africa’s largest mobile operator is turning that logic on its head.IHS Towers shareholders have approved MTN Group’s proposed takeover of the remaining stake it does not already own, clearing one of the last major corporate hurdles. At an extraordinary general meeting on 4 August 2026, investors backed the deal by the required two-thirds majority.
The transaction still needs regulatory clearances across several markets and a handful of closing conditions, but the strategic signal is already unmistakable. After years of divesting infrastructure, MTN is moving to bring one of the continent’s largest tower portfolios fully in-house.
MTN already holds roughly 24 to 25 percent of IHS. Under the agreement first announced in February, it will acquire the rest for $8.50 per share in cash. That values the entire company at an enterprise value of about $6.2 billion. The structure is carefully engineered: MTN rolls over its existing stake, contributes approximately $1.1 billion from its own liquidity and debt facilities, and draws another $1.1 billion from IHS’s balance sheet—money unlocked largely by the recent sale of the tower company’s Latin American operations.
Existing IHS debt stays in place. Once completed, IHS will delist from the New York Stock Exchange and become a wholly owned subsidiary of MTN, focused solely on its African footprint of nearly 29,000 towers across Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Zambia.
This is not simply a corporate housekeeping exercise. MTN is buying control of a critical layer of the physical infrastructure on which Africa’s digital economy increasingly rests.
Why towers matter again
The first wave of African mobile growth was about voice and SMS—connecting people who had never had a phone. The second wave brought mobile internet and social media. The third, which we are living through now, is about data at scale: video streaming, cloud services, mobile money platforms processing billions of transactions, internet-of-things sensors, connected vehicles, and the early waves of artificial intelligence applications that will demand continuous, high-capacity connectivity.
All of those services ultimately depend on towers, fibre, spectrum, power and data centres. The glamorous part of technology happens on the screen in a user’s hand. Behind it sits a vast, capital-intensive physical network that must keep expanding and densifying. Owning more of that network gives an operator greater say over timing, technology choices, colocation economics and the ability to support new high-bandwidth use cases without negotiating every step with a third-party landlord.
MTN’s own evolution makes the logic sharper. The company of 2026 is no longer primarily a seller of airtime. Across its markets it has built substantial fintech platforms, entertainment offerings, enterprise solutions and digital services. When your ambition is simply to carry calls, towers can look like an expensive, low-margin asset.
When your ambition is to become one of the core digital platforms linking African consumers and businesses, the same towers become a strategic foundation. Control over the passive infrastructure reduces lease costs over time, creates potential synergies, and positions the group to capture more of the value generated by the data explosion and the coming AI wave.
Ralph Mupita, MTN’s president and chief executive, has framed the deal in precisely those terms—linking it to the group’s Ambition 2030 strategy and the growing importance of digital infrastructure and AI for Africa’s development. Towers, in this view, are no longer something to be outsourced; they are a value-creation driver.
The wider infrastructure race
MTN is not acting in isolation. Across the continent operators are pouring capital into fibre networks, data centres, fintech platforms and new connectivity layers.
Just days ago Airtel Africa commercially launched Starlink’s satellite-to-phone service in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the first such deployment on the continent—allowing compatible smartphones to connect directly to satellites for basic messaging and light data in areas without terrestrial coverage.
The service is expected to expand across Airtel’s 14 markets. Meanwhile, demand for computing capacity is rising as artificial intelligence applications push companies toward larger, more power-hungry data centres.
The next competitive battleground in African telecoms will therefore be multi-dimensional: on the handset, inside the mobile wallet, in the data centre, across fibre backbones, on the towers that still carry the bulk of traffic, and increasingly in low-Earth orbit. Operators that control more of these layers will have more room to innovate and more resilience against disruption.
There is a quiet irony at the heart of the technology story. The more digital the world becomes, the more physical infrastructure it seems to require. AI needs servers. Servers need data centres. Data centres need reliable electricity and high-capacity fibre. Smartphones and connected devices need dense mobile networks. Mobile networks still need towers—and all of it needs enormous amounts of patient capital.
MTN’s move to take full ownership of IHS Towers is therefore about more than one corporate transaction. It reflects a broader realisation taking hold across the industry: the companies that control the underlying infrastructure will have a decisive say in what can be built on top of it.
After years in which towers were treated primarily as assets to be monetised and leased back, Africa’s largest telecom group is choosing to bring a massive piece of that infrastructure closer to home.
