13Enabling Future Value
Regulatory Strategy
Shaping the Rules. Strengthening the Institutions.
Regulation is where public purpose meets private capital. Designed well, it attracts investment and protects citizens at the same time. Designed badly, it is challenged and the cost falls on both sides.
We help regulators regulate well, help regulated enterprises engage regulation strategically, and help African states convert continental and regional commitments into enforceable national law.
Platform
13 of 14
Enabling Future Value — Connecting markets, shaping the rules and building the resilience on which the next decade depends.
Practice engine
FIT + TED
Purpose
To help regulators regulate well, to help regulated enterprises engage regulation strategically, and to help African states and institutions convert continental and regional commitments into enforceable national law.
Why this matters
Markets do not outperform their regulators. Capital prices regulatory risk before it prices commercial risk, and across much of Africa the binding constraint on investment is not the absence of opportunity but the unpredictability of the rules and the fragility of the institutions that make them.
Regulatory failure is expensive and it is rarely visible until it is severe. A licensing framework without clear criteria invites challenge. Enforcement powers exercised without vires are overturned on appeal, at the cost of the regulator’s authority. A tariff methodology that cannot be defended produces litigation instead of revenue. Overlapping agency mandates leave the regulated enterprise unable to comply with everyone at once. And a continental instrument that is ratified but never domesticated confers no rights at all.
This Platform exists because regulation is now a strategic discipline in its own right. It is where public purpose is converted into enforceable rules, where Africa’s integration commitments either become law or remain aspiration, and where the difference between a functioning market and a stalled one is usually decided.
What clients bring to this platform
- Powers exercised without a clear statutory basis, and decisions that do not survive review
- Overlapping or contested mandates between agencies, with no mechanism to resolve them
- Rules that cannot practically be enforced, or that were made without lawful consultation
- Enforcement action reversed on appeal for want of procedural fairness or proportionality
- Tariff and pricing determinations that invite litigation rather than settle it
- Regulatory capacity that has not kept pace with the complexity of the sectors supervised
- Independence in law but not in practice, or policy direction expressed through informal channels
- Instruments ratified at continental level and never transposed into national law
- Divergent domestication across member states, defeating the purpose of harmonisation
- For enterprises: multiple regulators with inconsistent requirements and no single point of engagement
What we do
Regulatory Institution Design & Mandate
- Establishment statutes and legal form
- Mandate definition, boundaries and overlap resolution
- Independence, governance and board arrangements
- Funding models and financial autonomy
- Memoranda of understanding and inter-agency protocols
- Accountability to Parliament, audit and the executive
- Delegation, sub-delegation and the limits of both
- Mergers, splits and rationalisation of agencies
Rulemaking & Regulatory Instruments
- Regulations, rules, directives, guidelines and codes
- Legislative and subsidiary drafting
- Consultation design and the legal consequences of getting it wrong
- Regulatory impact assessment and cost-benefit analysis
- Vires review before publication rather than after challenge
- Commencement, transition, savings and sunset provisions
- Periodic review and stock-take of accumulated instruments
Licensing & Authorisation Frameworks
- Licence categories, criteria and application procedures
- Conditions, variation, transfer and renewal
- Suspension, revocation and the due process each requires
- Competitive award, auctions and comparative selection
- Registers, transparency and the publication of decisions
- Grandfathering and legacy authorisations
Enforcement, Sanctions & Administrative Justice
- Investigation powers, evidence gathering and their limits
- Administrative penalty frameworks and proportionality
- Settlement, undertakings and compliance agreements
- Reasoned decisions and the standard of reasons required
- Internal review, tribunal and appellate strategy
- Judicial review exposure and how to design it out
- Interim measures, directions and emergency powers
Economic Regulation, Pricing & Tariffs
- Tariff methodology and price control design
- Regulatory asset base, cost of capital and allowed revenue
- Efficiency, quality of service and performance incentives
- Subsidy, cross-subsidy and lifeline provisions
- Cost disallowance: basis, process and finality
- Revenue determinations and their review
- Market design and the transition between market models
Competition & Market Conduct
- Market inquiries and studies
- Dominance, abuse and restrictive practices
- The boundary between sector regulators and the competition authority
- Merger review interface, including regional filings
- Consumer protection, disclosure and fair treatment
- Market conduct supervision in regulated industries
Treaty Domestication & Legal Harmonisation
Africa’s continental and regional architecture is extensive. Its effect at national level depends on transposition. This strand is dedicated to closing that gap.
- Gap analysis: auditing national law against instruments a state has signed or ratified
- Drafting domesticating legislation, and the constitutional route to it in monist and dualist systems
- Model laws and their adaptation to national legal traditions and drafting conventions
- Regional approximation and harmonisation programmes across member states
- Mutual recognition, equivalence and passporting arrangements
- Institutional arrangements for implementation — which agency, what powers, funded how
- Reporting, review and compliance obligations owed to continental and regional organs
- Advising continental and regional institutions themselves on their instruments, legal frameworks and implementation strategy
Regulatory Strategy for Enterprises
- Regulatory risk mapping across the group and its jurisdictions
- Engagement strategy with a regulator, and how to make representations that land
- Consultation responses and industry position papers
- Licence protection, renewal strategy and condition negotiation
- Managing investigations, information requests and dawn raids
- Multi-regulator co-ordination where requirements conflict
- Regulatory dispute avoidance, and escalation only where it is right
Regulatory Reform, Capacity & Integrity
- Institutional diagnostics and reform roadmaps
- Capacity building, training and drafting manuals
- Secondments and embedded support
- Performance frameworks and regulatory KPIs
- Conflict of interest, revolving door and anti-capture safeguards
- Transparency, decision registers and public reporting
- Peer review and benchmarking against comparable jurisdictions
Signature solutions
Defined pieces of work that address the needs this platform meets most often. Each can be scoped and commissioned on its own.
Regulator Mandate & Powers Review
A full audit of what an institution may lawfully do and where it is exposed: mandate, powers, procedures and the gaps a challenger would find first, together with the enforcement and rulemaking discipline that keeps decisions and instruments standing — consultation, impact assessment, drafting, proportionality and record.
Treaty Domestication Gap Analysis
National law measured against EAC, COMESA, AfCFTA and AU Agenda 2063 commitments, delivered as a gap register and a prioritised drafting programme so that continental promises acquire the force of law at home, instrument by instrument.
Regulatory Institution Strengthening Programme
A diagnostic, a reform roadmap and a capability transfer programme that leave the regulator stronger in mandate, method and people, including tariff and economic regulation methodology, and the tax policy and revenue administration reform that state institutions increasingly carry long after we have left the building.
How we deliver
- Diagnostic. What the institution may lawfully do, what it actually does, and the distance between the two
- Design. Options tested against constitutional limits, fiscal reality, capacity and enforceability — not only against best practice elsewhere
- Consultation. Structured engagement with industry, government and the public, conducted so that the process itself is not the ground of challenge
- Drafting. Instruments drafted to national conventions, with commencement, transition and review built in
- Implementation. Procedures, templates, decision registers and internal review mechanisms, so the framework operates without us
- Capability transfer. Training, manuals and secondments, because a regulator that depends on external counsel to exercise its powers is not yet a regulator
Representative mandates
- Advising a sector regulator on the scope and limits of its enforcement and investigative powers
- Drafting licensing frameworks and subsidiary legislation for a regulated industry
- Reviewing tariff methodology and the defensibility of a revenue determination
- Advising on the domestication of continental and regional instruments into national law
- Supporting a regional institution on harmonisation of member state legislation
- Designing an administrative penalty, settlement and compliance framework
- Advising a regulated enterprise operating under four regulators with conflicting requirements
- Delivering an institutional strengthening programme financed by a development partner
- Advising on the establishment, merger or rationalisation of regulatory agencies
Illustrative. Client names and commercial details are withheld where confidentiality obligations apply.
Why Ligomarc
We act on both sides of the regulatory relationship, which is unusual and is the source of our value. Advising a regulator teaches you what a regulated enterprise can realistically be asked to do; advising a regulated enterprise teaches you which regulatory decisions will hold and which will unravel. We bring both perspectives to every mandate, subject always to strict conflict management.
We approach regulation as constitutional lawyers first. Every regulatory act is an exercise of delegated public power, and the questions that decide its fate — source of power, limits, due process, proportionality, reasons — are constitutional questions. Firms that treat regulation as sector technical work discover this at the appeal stage.
And we are finance-law first. Regulation is priced. A licensing condition, a tariff methodology, a penalty regime and a domestication timetable each carry a cost of capital consequence, and we advise on that consequence as a matter of course rather than as an afterthought.
Institutional Experience Applied. Eight years in a constitutional office responsible for the appointment, discipline and ethics of judicial officers is, in substance, regulatory experience of the most exacting kind — designing and conducting processes against office holders that had to survive judicial review, deliver reasons, and impose proportionate sanction. That is the discipline we bring to enforcement design, administrative penalties and reasoned decision-making. Our whole-of-government experience, developed while operating a licensed national enterprise under court appointment, informs how we sequence regulatory reform across ministries, agencies, the state legal offices and Parliament — because a reform that is legally sound and politically unsequenced does not survive its first year.
Platform leadership
Regional & continental frameworks
The AU Constitutive Act and the instruments and model laws adopted through its organs; the African Charter on Values and Principles of Public Service and Administration; the AU Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption; the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance; the African Peer Review Mechanism; the AfCFTA Agreement and its Protocols, together with the domestication obligations they carry; the EAC Treaty and Common Market Protocol, including their provisions on approximation and harmonisation of national laws; the COMESA Treaty and the COMESA Competition Regulations; the Tripartite Free Trade Area; and, at national level, the constitutional provisions governing delegated legislation, administrative justice, accountability and the ratification and domestication of treaties.
Contribution to the African Purposes
Advances African Institutional Stewardship directly, and as its central purpose — this Platform exists to make African regulators capable, lawful and durable. Advances African Continental Integration by closing the gap between what African states have agreed and what their national law actually provides, which is where the integration agenda is currently being lost. Supports African Family Businesses, for whom regulatory unpredictability and compliance cost fall hardest and who rarely have the resources to litigate a bad decision. Honours African Culture & Heritage by designing regulation that reflects African institutional realities — customary authority, plural legal orders and community structures — rather than transplanting frameworks built for other conditions.
Selected experience
All experience →Central bank and financial-sector regulator
Reported
End-to-end technology-governance framework for a central bank
A central bank and financial-sector regulator needed a technology-governance framework addressing both its own internal governance and its regulatory oversight of the sector, spanning data, cyber risk and digital supervision, and aligned to regional and continental policy frameworks.
- Technology
- Regulation
- Governance
Public asset and claims institution
Reported
Resolution and orderly closure of a public institution's legacy claims
A public institution holding complex legacy assets, records and litigation needed a resolution and dissolution architecture capable of closing out claims in a way that would not reopen them.
- Restructuring
- Government
- Special Situations
National electricity and transmission sector institution
Ongoing
Institutional advisory for a public electricity and transmission institution
A public infrastructure institution operating in a regulated, capital-intensive environment needed standing legal and strategic support covering mandate defensibility, procurement and commercial risk.
- Infrastructure
- Energy
- Regulation
Who we serve with this
Discuss a regulatory strategy mandate.
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