Alfred Msemo, Aleka Holdings founder, shares the untold side of the pawaTech–Nanovas legal battle over betPawa Tanzania. Sourced facts, regulatory records, and hard-won lessons for African entrepreneurs.

Nothing Good Comes from Bad Businesses with Bad Partners

A Letter to Fellow Entrepreneurs On the betPawa chapter. The lessons it forced me to learn, and what I would tell any African founder before they sign.

“Until the lion has its own storytellers, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

African Proverb

A great many founders never share what really happened to them. The wins get celebrated. The failures get buried. But the real lessons, the ones that can save a younger entrepreneur from walking into the same room you walked into, live in the stories nobody tells. This is one of those stories.

I write it in my own name, on the website of a company I built, because nobody else is going to write it for me. That is the point of the proverb above.

How it began: An investment that led us into the wrong room.

Our group’s first contact with Kresten Buch and the betPawa world did not begin with betting at all. It began with an investment we had made in a flight-booking venture called Ahoy, founded by an entrepreneur named Sylvia Brune. Ahoy was a respectable idea, well-led, and well-intentioned. It did not survive the devastation that COVID-19 brought to the travel sector.

But that investment placed us inside a small network of co-investors, and through that network we were introduced to Kresten Buch, a Danish businessman who, we were told, had built something formidable in African online betting. The introduction felt like the natural way these things happen between founders: someone you have already done business with, in a venture you respected, vouching for someone else.

I share this opening detail deliberately, because I want any reader who is also a founder to recognise the pattern. The most damaging partnerships rarely begin with a stranger making an aggressive pitch. They begin in respectable rooms, through respectable introductions, on what feels like respectable terms. That is precisely what makes them difficult to refuse and, later, difficult to admit.

An admission, before anything else.

Before I describe what the partnership turned into, I owe my readers an admission about the industry it was in.

I should not have entered online sports betting. I do not say that because the contract was structured against me, though I now believe it was. I say it because the business itself is one I have come to believe an entrepreneur of conscience should refuse to build. Gambling companies do not, in the end, make their money from the casual customer who places a recreational bet on a Saturday afternoon. They make their money disproportionately from the customer who cannot stop. Whatever the marketing language about entertainment and sport, the unit economics are weighted toward human compulsion. I did not want to see that in 2021. I see it clearly now, having watched what online betting does, every day, to the salaries of young men and to the school fees of households across this continent.

To the young African entrepreneur weighing a venture in this sector, weigh it again. The universe of honest work to be built has never been wider than it is in the moment we are living through. With artificial intelligence reshaping entire categories of cost and creating entirely new ones at a pace that has surprised even the people building it, the list of fields in which an enterprising founder can build something lasting is genuinely vast. Technology and AI, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, financial services, energy and climate, logistics, education, mobility. There is more good work waiting to be done across this continent today than at any point in its modern history. Choose work that compounds returns over a lifetime without requiring you to look away from your own customer. Choose work you can defend in your own home.

How the partnership was structured.

Nanovas Tanzania Limited, an affiliate of Aleka Holdings, was incorporated in Tanzania in 2016 as a licensed online sports betting and gaming company. In 2019 the company registered the betPawa trade name with BRELA and held licences from the Gaming Board of Tanzania, the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) and the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA).

The operating arrangement was with softPawa Limited, a UK-registered member of Kresten Buch‘s pawaTech Group. Under a Software Licence and Technical Services Agreement, softPawa provided the betting platform and technology. Nanovas held the local licences, employed the staff, managed the regulators, navigated the tax obligations, and built the customer base on the ground in Tanzania.

On paper, it was a partnership. In practice, the arrangement concentrated control and profit extraction with the foreign parent while localising virtually all of the operational, regulatory and reputational risk.

According to reporting by Africa Intelligence, the service fees pawaTech has charged to its African franchisees have run as high as 68 per cent of the franchisee’s monthly net profit, against an industry norm closer to 30 per cent. In the Rwandan case, the same publication reports that the local operator transfers more than 70 per cent of monthly profit to pawaTech in service fees. Read those figures again. The local partner does all the operational work, employs all the staff, takes on all the regulatory exposure in their own country, and surrenders the majority of the profit to a foreign entity that controls the technology and sits several jurisdictions away from any direct consequence.

Sources for the figures above: “Online gambling giant betPawa faces mounting setbacks”, Africa Intelligence, 19 January 2026; “Mr Eazi’s risky gambles with betting business betPawa”, Africa Intelligence, 15 May 2023.

A contract that is legally enforceable is not, for that reason, a fair contract. History is full of enforceable injustices.

What happened in Tanzania.

In 2021 and 2022, Grant Thornton UK LLP, pawaTech’s statutory auditors, raised concerns about certain payments and asked management to investigate. According to Africa Intelligence’s reporting of 15 May 2023, Grant Thornton subsequently withdrew its services on 10 November 2022, citing concerns about the compliance of certain accounting practices, and referred the matter to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. I make no characterisation of those concerns of my own. I simply note that when a major international auditor steps away from a client and notifies its own professional body, it is the kind of information a prospective counterparty would expect to be told before signing anything.

What happened next on the ground in Tanzania is a matter for the Tanzanian courts, which is where it currently sits. I will keep my account of it to the facts that are documented in regulatory correspondence, in filings, and in evidence that has been placed before the appropriate forums:

On 23 September 2022, the Gaming Board of Tanzania received a letter from softPawa’s lawyers stating that the platform would be shut down. Nanovas, the licensed local operator and softPawa’s contractual counterparty, was not directly informed.

By 26 September 2022, the betPawa website had been diverted from Nanovas to Extrabet Limited, a separate company. Customer files were absorbed. A third of the local staff were laid off shortly thereafter.

During this period, softPawa’s representatives approached Selcom, the Tanzanian payments company through which customer funds were processed, and pressed for customer balances held in respect of the Tanzanian operation to be moved out of Nanovas and toward destinations connected with the broader pawaPay payments business. Selcom’s Chief Executive, Sameer Hirji, refused. He did so cleanly, on the simple ground that the movement requested fell outside the rules under which his licence permits him to operate. He was not being asked to take a side in a commercial dispute, and he did not pretend to. He was being asked to do something that the rule book did not allow, and he said no. That, in this market, is integrity in its quietest and most useful form.

What I want to acknowledge here, in writing and in public, is what that conduct meant to us, and what it has taught me about the deeper value of doing business with domestic counterparties of real calibre. I have long held the view that an African entrepreneur should, wherever possible, do business with other African businesses and trust the principle that shared value generated within a market tends, over time, to compound for everyone inside it. With Sameer and the team at Selcom, that conviction was rewarded in the way I most needed it to be. Selcom did not need to take our side. They were our service provider, not our advocate. They took the side of the rule book. And in doing so, they modelled for me what two domestic counterparties trying to operate properly in the same market should actually look like.

I will add one further thing in the same spirit. If our own conduct had ever drifted into something improper, it is precisely people like Mr Hirji who could have, and would have, held us to account as well. That is what real accountability looks like in a domestic market. It is not the foreign lawyer’s letter from a London arbitral seat. It is the local counterparty who knows the rules, knows your business, and is willing to say no when no is the answer, without letting the emotion of the moment cloud the judgement of the rule. That kind of partner is the partner an African entrepreneur should be working to build their network around.

It is no accident, in my view, that Selcom has gone from strength to strength in the years since, and now operates as Selcom Bank, a fully licensed deposit-taking institution serving millions of Tanzanians. Institutions of that quality, built by founders who hold their own line and other people’s lines alike, are exactly the kind of domestic capacity this continent needs more of. For as long as I am in business, I will continue to champion that kind of shared value generation, domestically and on the record.

Alongside Mr Hirji’s conduct, the formal regulatory record continued to develop. The Tanzania Revenue Authority issued agency notices for unpaid taxes in excess of TZS 5 billion. The Gaming Board issued a cease-and-desist order to softPawa UK, with which softPawa did not comply. An external audit later identified invoices that the audit characterised as irregular and inconsistent with the underlying services.

I will not litigate the merits on a webpage. I will say only this: it is not pleasant, as the licensed local operator in your own country, to learn from a third-party regulator what is happening to your own platform.

The arbitration, and the appeal.

When the relationship collapsed, softPawa pursued arbitration through the London Court of International Arbitration, a forum the original contract had selected. The contract’s choice of London, under English law, is itself one of the lessons I most want to pass on to fellow founders. I will return to that below.

We were initially represented by Stephenson Harwood. As the proceedings continued and the cost burden mounted in the way these proceedings always do for an African respondent, I took over the conduct of the matter personally for parts of the latter stages. I do not romanticise that. It was not heroic. It was necessary. But I want any founder reading this to know it is possible to stand in your own corner when you have to.

An award was issued in 2024. It has since been the subject of enforcement proceedings before the High Court of Tanzania, and is now on appeal before the Court of Appeal of Tanzania. The appeal raises preliminary objections that, in our view, go to the heart of the matter. I trust the appellate process, I will accept whatever the bench decides, and I will not characterise its likely outcome in advance.

What I will note, with respect, is this: pawaTech has publicly characterised its position as a final victory. That characterisation is, at minimum, incomplete. The matter is actively before the courts of the United Republic of Tanzania, and remains there at the date of this article.

A pattern, not an isolated case.

What has helped me understand my own experience as something other than personal misfortune is the public record that has accumulated, in serious journalism, around pawaTech’s operations across the continent. These are not my allegations. They are documented in published reporting by Africa Intelligence, a Paris-based publication with no commercial interest in either side of this story. Any reader is free to consult the original sources and draw their own conclusions.

UGANDA, 2019 to 2022

After the Ugandan government’s action against online betting, the operation reportedly continued through a local front-company arrangement in which a Ugandan entity held the gambling licence and bank accounts while the foreign partner retained effective control. The Ugandan Revenue Authority later raised a USD 4.6 million claim against the local entity for under-declared turnover.

KENYA, 2019

Following the Kenyan interior ministry’s enforcement action, the head of softPawa’s Nairobi subsidiary was expelled from the country.

SENEGAL, 2024 to 2025

Just months after a high-profile launch, betPawa withdrew from Senegal after authorities declined to approve pawaPay, a payment aggregator partly owned, on the company’s own account, by Kresten Buch. pawaTech then sought EUR 1 million in loan repayments from the local franchise, whose director was subsequently summoned by the Senegalese labour inspectorate over unpaid wages and unfair dismissals.

CÔTE D’IVOIRE, 2024 to 2025

The Ivorian partnership ended in mutual criminal complaints, with pawaTech publicly accusing its local partner of extorting USD 3.6 million, and abandoning the market after authorities again declined to approve pawaPay or guarantee tax incentives.

CAMEROON, 2022 to 2024

The local franchise was reportedly classified under a small-business tax regime intended for companies with annual turnover below CFA 50 million, despite generating revenues many multiples of that threshold, a discrepancy that ultimately triggered a tax reassessment.

ETHIOPIA

A multi-agency enforcement action against online betting led to multiple arrests and the revocation of betting licences.

Six countries. Six different local partners. Six very similar endings. That is not a sequence of unfortunate coincidences. It is the natural output of a model in which the foreign principal has been engineered to extract value and to exit clean when conditions sour, while the local partner is left to face the regulator, the tax authority, and the labour inspectorate alone.

What I really want to say about partnership.

If I step back from my own story and ask what the deeper lesson is, it is this: you cannot have a good contract with a bad person. No clause, however well drafted, can compensate for character that is not there. And character is not visible in a memorandum of understanding. It is only visible in time.

I have noticed, in my own dealings across regions, that Asian counterparties — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — tend to insist on a long period of slow acquaintance before committing to anything substantial. There is a great deal of shared meal-taking, of small joint ventures before large ones, of patient observation of how the other party behaves when nothing is yet at stake. Some of my European partners, by contrast, have moved faster and have, more often than I once would have admitted, relied on the legal phrase “in good faith” in a way that suggests the phrase has been allowed to do the work that personal knowledge ought to be doing.

I do not want to draw that contrast too sharply, because it is unfair to do so. People and businesses, in every part of the world, are more similar than they are different. There are honourable European partners and dishonourable Asian ones, and the same is true in every direction. What I want to extract from the observation is not a geographic stereotype but a method:

Spend time. Learn each other’s values. Exchange small value before you exchange large value. Watch how your counterparty behaves when nothing has yet been signed. Only then commit.

The contracts that I have signed in haste are, almost without exception, the contracts that have caused me the most pain. The relationships I built slowly are, almost without exception, the ones that still stand.

Five lessons, offered without bitterness.

To the founder reading this who is weighing a deal, in betting, in fintech, in mining, in any sector, these are the five things I would tell you today.

What growth actually looks like

I will admit a small private vanity here. In the last several weeks I have had two small experiences that, taken together, told me more about my own growth than any quarterly report could.

The first was a fellow operator I respect introducing me, with genuine enthusiasm, to an opportunity in the gaming sector. He thought he was offering me a gift. A version of myself in 2021 would have taken the meeting, taken the deck, talked the language of EBITDA and licence fees, and probably ended up in a room I had already learned to leave. The version of me he was actually speaking to thanked him sincerely, wished him every success with the venture, and declined.

The second was a friend who, after watching me handle a difficult negotiation, told me I should have been a lawyer. I took it as the compliment it was intended to be, and politely passed.

Neither of these is the kind of story founders usually tell, because nothing “happened.” But both moments are, for me, the proof that the betPawa years left something useful behind. Knowing what to refuse is, in the end, more valuable than knowing how to negotiate.

On scars, punctures and integrity

To any founder reading this who is currently in the middle of their own version of this story, facing a media campaign, an enforcement action, a partner who has turned, or a contract you wish you had read more carefully, I want to say one more thing, and then I will stop.

Even a brand-new car, driven long enough, will eventually pick up a puncture. The puncture is not the measure of the car. What you do at the side of the road is the measure of the car. Public shaming, a media cycle, a one-sided press release, a dent on your name in a Google search. These things hurt, and there is no use pretending they do not. But they are not the measure of your integrity either. Your integrity is what you do next, with the tools and the time you still have.

The checks and balances we want in the system are not, in the end, going to install themselves. They are installed by founders, regulators, journalists and courts who insist on them, one transaction at a time. That kind of insistence, patient, public, and on the record, is part of the work.

Where Aleka stands today

This chapter tested everything: resources, resolve, and faith in the systems meant to protect African businesses. It did not break us. Today, Aleka Holdings is focused on a singular conviction: that every human being deserves access to quality healthcare and to as many honest opportunities as we can help create.

We have emerged with scars, and with clarity. We maintain cordial relationships with most parties who were involved in the betPawa years, including some within the broader betPawa group itself. We will continue to tell this story because every founder who reads it before signing a bad contract is one more person we have helped.

On the learning curve, and an invitation

I am thirty-five years old as I write this. In that time I have been a student, an employee, a founder, a teacher, and I can now, with a measure of conviction I could not honestly have claimed five years ago, also call myself an entrepreneur. If there is one thing every stage of that path has taught me, it is that the learning curve cannot be skipped. A good entrepreneur was almost always a good employee first. A good employee was almost always a student who learned how to learn. Life, in the end, is a sequence of graduations, and the people I most respect are the ones still graduating long after the formal certificates have stopped arriving.

I am always looking to be in the company of people who think this way. If anything in this piece has resonated with you, or if you are working on something daringly difficult and quietly important, anywhere in the world but particularly on this continent, get in touch. I wrote recently on LinkedIn about the difference between believing in the right opportunity and building the right foundation — the response told me that this kind of honesty is what founders actually want from each other. The address is at the foot of this page, and it is not ceremonial. Tell me what you are building. Let us see whether there is work we can do together.

Three short words to close

To Kresten Buch and the pawaTech Group: I do not write this with personal animus. I write it because the public record has, until now, carried only one side of a story that has affected more African businesses than mine. The journalists who reported the facts referenced here remain reachable. So do I.

To the Court of Appeal of the United Republic of Tanzania: I trust the process. I will accept whatever the bench decides. This article does not seek to relitigate the case; it seeks only to place its wider context on the public record, where, in fairness to other African founders, it belongs.

To my fellow entrepreneurs in Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Kampala, Accra, Abidjan, Dakar, Yaoundé, Kigali, Nairobi and Johannesburg: persevere. Business, much of the time, is comparable to a long campaign. Each scar, each fall, is a lesson and a chance to do better and do more. Do not let the setbacks define you, and do not let the noise drown out the work. The story is not over; it is only entering the chapter where you return with more wisdom than you went in with.

“The measure of a person is not whether they fall. Everyone falls. It is whether they rise with more wisdom than they had before they went down.”

Alfred Christopher Msemo

Get in touch

For enquiries on healthcare collaboration, medical access, or guidance on selecting partners across Sub-Saharan Africa based on our experience:

Direct: amsemo@aleka.tech

Alfred Christopher Msemo

Founder & Chairman, Aleka Holdings Limited

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, May 2026

NOTE ON THIS ARTICLE

This piece represents the personal reflections and opinions of the author. Factual references to the operations of the pawaTech group across African markets are drawn from published reporting by Africa Intelligence and from regulatory correspondence, court filings and witness evidence in the relevant proceedings, and are attributed accordingly. The author acknowledges that pawaTech disputes aspects of those reports and of the underlying commercial relationship discussed here. Legal proceedings between the parties are continuing on appeal before the Court of Appeal of the United Republic of Tanzania, and nothing in this article is intended to prejudge or characterise their outcome. Readers are encouraged to consult the primary sources and form their own conclusions. This article is not legal advice.

PawaTech & betPawa Dispute: Alfred Msemo’s Response