Condia Insider: Airtel is eating into Safaricom’s pie

We have prepared context and insights about this week’s leading news. The stories are:

• PocketLawyers gets backed to speed up legal work in Africa
• Airtel Kenya beats Safaricom in subscriber growth
• Meta and TikTok tighten content rules

PocketLawyers gets backed to speed up legal work in Africa

Legal services in Africa can be many things, but fast usually isn’t one of them. Now, PocketLawyers, a Nigerian legal tech startup, is trying to flip that script. The startup has secured new funding from Nubia Capital to accelerate the process of legal work on the continent, leveraging AI to do so.

Founded in 2023 by lawyer-turned-founder Ngozi Nwabueze, PocketLawyers offers AI-powered tools that help legal professionals draft documents, manage cases, and streamline client work. Its flagship product, PocketAI, automates legal research and document generation.

Zoom in: The backing also doubles as a win for FirstFounders, the venture studio that helped build PocketLawyers from the ground up. David Lanre Messan, FirstFounders’ CEO, says the original idea behind PocketLawyers was to make legal services more affordable. But it quickly became clear that speed was the real pain point. “Lawyers spend a lot of time digging through case studies and drafting documents from scratch,” he told Condia. “We saw an opportunity to shrink that timeline.”

With this fresh funding, PocketLawyers plans to expand its reach across the continent and further integrate AI automation. 

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Airtel Kenya beats Safaricom in subscriber growth

For the first time in a long time, Airtel Kenya is outpacing Safaricom on one key metric: subscriber growth. The telco has just crossed the 24 million mark, adding 3.01 million new SIMs in Q1 2025, almost double Safaricom’s 1.7 million.

That’s a 13.95% growth sprint for Airtel, according to fresh data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), compared to Safaricom’s more modest 3.6% uptick, bringing its total user base to 48.2 million. 

Kenya’s mobile market is still growing overall. There are now 76.2 million active SIM cards in circulation, surpassing the country’s population, as dual-SIM life has become the norm.

Other players? Equitel closed the quarter with 1.5 million users, Telkom with 1.2 million, and JTL hovering around 700,000. But Airtel’s momentum is the real headline here.

Airtel Kenya’s MD, Ashish Malhotra, described the milestone as “a moment of gratitude and determination,” while hinting at continued investments in network upgrades to maintain momentum and stay on the regulator’s good side.

Still, don’t count Safaricom out. Its stronghold on mobile money, especially through M-Pesa, is still unmatched.

Meta and TikTok tighten content rules

Meta’s had it with Facebook accounts recycling other people’s posts. The company says it’s stepping up enforcement against pages that mass repost content without adding anything new. So far in 2025, 10 million impersonator accounts have been removed, and 500,000 spammy profiles have been punished with reduced reach, demonetization, or both.

Facebook is even testing a new feature that redirects viewers of duplicate videos back to the original creator. No more easy clout farming off someone else’s work.

Meanwhile, TikTok is also tightening its digital borders. The platform says it removed 3.6 million videos in Nigeria alone in Q1 2025, a 50% jump from Q4 2024. Of those, 92% were taken down within 24 hours, and most were caught by its automated systems. TikTok also shut down over 90,000 livestreams and LIVE rooms that violated its community guidelines.

On the global stage, TikTok removed over 211 million videos in Q1 2025, up from 153 million the previous quarter, with more than 184 million taken down through automation alone.

By the Numbers

1.02

Japan has set a new world record for internet speed, reaching 1.02 petabits per second, according to the country’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). That’s fast enough to download the entire Netflix library or the English version of Wikipedia thousands of times, in just one second.

This new speed is 3.5 million times faster than the average internet speed in the United States, based on current data.