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Uber announced shutting down its ride-hailing operations in Nigeria and Uganda, effective Wednesday, 2 September 2026, ending 12 years in a country where it launched the app-based ride-hailing category when it arrived in Lagos in 2014. The same day, Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi told employees the company was cutting roughly 3,300 roles, about 10% of its global workforce, in a restructuring aimed at stripping out management layers. Nigeria and Uganda are not mentioned in that memo.
But the two announcements landing within hours of each other is the clearest available explanation of why a company reporting record cash flow is walking away from Africa’s largest consumer market. Lorraine Onduru, Head of Communications for Uber in East and West Africa, reportedly said the company is concentrating investment in markets where it can offer drivers earning opportunities at scale.
Uber has said the decision is specific to the two countries and does not affect operations elsewhere on the continent, and that it is not connected to the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria directive on e-hailing at airports. That is corporate language for a portfolio decision, and the memo published the same day says where the portfolio is heading. Khosrowshahi framed the job cuts as a structural fix.
Growth, he wrote in the memo, had brought “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership” than the business needs at its current scale. A leaner company, he argued, would generate savings the company intends to reinvest.