Two days after shutting down its ride-hailing operations in Nigeria and Uganda entirely, Uber quietly restored Visa card payments for riders in Kenya, reversing a decision that had frozen Visa users out of the app for eighth months. There was no press release for either the removal or the return. Kenyan riders simply got a push notification on Friday, September 4, reading “Pay with Visa! Add your Visa card and enjoy a seamless payment experience on Uber.” Uber still hasn’t explained what actually changed.
The Visa saga in Kenya has its own tangled backstory worth untangling. Uber suspended Visa acceptance there in January 2026, and the company’s public explanation at the time pointed squarely at cost: “Payment costs globally are on the rise, which impacts businesses and their consumers,” a spokesperson told TechCabal, describing a routine market-by-market review of payment methods. But that wasn’t the only story circulating. Separate reporting around the same period documented months of rider and driver complaints tied specifically to Visa transactions on the platform, including double charges and payments that failed even after money had already left a customer’s account. Visa itself pushed back publicly against being cut off, telling media it was actively in touch with Uber and working to resolve the situation, language that reads more like a company defending a relationship than one that had simply priced itself out of a market.
For riders, the eight-month gap wasn’t a total payment lockout. Mastercard, American Express, M-Pesa, Airtel Money, PayPal, and cash all remained available throughout, which meant Uber kept functioning in Kenya without Visa specifically rather than losing access entirely. But Visa isn’t a marginal option in Kenya’s card market, it’s the largest card scheme by cardholder base in the country, meaning its removal cut off the dominant card payment method for exactly the kind of business travellers and expatriates who lean on card payments over mobile money.
The underlying cost dynamics explain why Visa specifically became the target rather than cards generally. International card transactions carry a stack of fees that mobile money simply doesn’t: interchange fees paid to the card-issuing bank, scheme charges paid to Visa itself, and foreign exchange spreads tied to settling payments offshore. M-Pesa, by contrast, settles locally and instantly in Kenyan shillings, bypassing that entire international rail structure. For a company reviewing costs as aggressively as Uber has been globally, a payment method carrying three layers of fees that a locally-settled alternative doesn’t is an obvious place to look for savings, whether or not customer complaints were the immediate trigger.
None of that explains why Visa is back now, and Uber hasn’t said. No statement has clarified whether the underlying processing costs came down, whether Visa agreed to better terms, or whether renewed customer pressure simply outweighed the savings. What’s clear is the timing: this reversal landed just 48 hours after Uber walked away from Nigeria and Uganda entirely, ending twelve years of operations in Nigeria and folding Uganda into the same announcement, all as part of a global restructuring cutting roughly 3,300 corporate jobs and, according to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, aimed at flattening management layers and consolidating teams.
That contrast is the real story here, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than treating as coincidence. Uber isn’t retreating from Africa uniformly. In the same stretch of days, it walked away from two markets completely while actively re-investing in solving a payment friction point in a third. That pattern suggests something more deliberate than a continent-wide pullback: a market-by-market triage where Uber is willing to fix real problems in markets it intends to keep, while cutting losses entirely in markets it doesn’t see a path to profitability in under its new strategic priorities, increasingly weighted toward ride-sharing in strong markets, delivery, and autonomous vehicles.
What that suggests for Uber’s future in Africa is a more selective footprint rather than a shrinking one. Kenya’s ride-hailing market is more mature and more competitive than Nigeria’s or Uganda’s were for Uber specifically, with Bolt, Little Cab, and a deeper base of card and mobile money infrastructure already in place, conditions that likely make Kenya a market worth the effort of renegotiating payment terms rather than abandoning. Nigeria and Uganda, by contrast, carried years of driver disputes over fares and commissions without full resolution, on top of currency instability that made unit economics harder to defend. If that read is right, the honest answer to where Uber’s African strategy goes from here isn’t “expanding” or “leaving,” it’s narrowing toward fewer, stronger markets where the company believes it can actually win, while treating the rest as not worth the fight anymore. Whether that bet pays off depends entirely on whether Kenya, and whichever other markets get the same treatment, can deliver the margins the rest of Uber’s business is now being reorganised around.
