1. Point of correction

Osahon Akpata began our conversation by correcting a misconception.

I had asked him to explain how CANEX Creations Inc, for which he is CEO, differs from “the larger CANEX fund.” It was a reasonable question, one many in the ecosystem have but rarely voice. But it was built on a false premise. “First of all,” he said, “there’s no larger fund.”

For a long time, that misconception has shaped how several players within Africa’s creative economy understand the available capital. CANEX, or the Creative Africa Nexus programme, and much of the language surrounding it has suggested it was a fund of sorts. For instance, a 2024 press release announced that “Afreximbank will increase its funding to the Creative Africa Nexus (CANEX) programme from $1 billion to $2 billion for the next three years.” The same release added, “With the newly increased $2 billion fund, Afreximbank aims to fulfil these verticals’ growing needs by providing infrastructure, financing, and other resources that will help Africa’s creative industries flourish on a global scale.”

So, part of that misconception has been fuelled by the bank’s own language, making it hard not to think of the CANEX programme as a “$2 billion fund.” But this gap between what people imagine CANEX to be and what it actually is is a story in itself.

So let me lay out the architecture, because the rest of this essay, and, dare I say, the future of this industry, depends on getting it right.

2. To be or not to be

To be clear, CANEX is not a fund. It is a programme, the embodiment of the African Export-Import Bank’s strategy for developing the continent’s creative and cultural industries. The bank moved into the sector for two reasons: its potential to create jobs at the scale the continent’s young population needs, and its hunger for the development and expansion capital it has long been denied. That programme, launched in 2021, sits atop several pillars. Financing is one of them; the others are capacity building, export promotion, policy advocacy, partnerships, and digitisation. This is the CANEX most people know. Its scope is broad, but it doesn’t include writing equity cheques.

CANEX Creations Inc, or CCInc, is a different machine entirely. It is a subsidiary of FEDA, the Fund for Export Development in Africa, Afreximbank’s equity investment arm, which was registered at the end of March 2024. The bank does not engage in equity or venture investing on its own balance sheet; FEDA does, and CCInc is the vehicle it created to take such positions in intellectual property.

Akpata was hired weeks after CCInc was registered to operationalise it, and he spent the better part of a year setting up governance structures, drafting policies and a business plan, and conducting a market assessment before the board appointed him CEO. Only after that did the company begin making investments.

So, CCInc has been investing for barely a year. This distinction matters, because the weight the ecosystem already places on it tells you something about how starved the sector is for this kind of capital.

But it’s also necessary to lay out the actual strategy at play here, given that CANEX Creations Inc doesn’t exist to do everything and solve every problem.

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3. The anatomy of an investment strategy

CCInc won’t back just any creative venture. Its focus is on intellectual property and the companies that build the infrastructure around it. Film and music, the sectors it’s most known for, are entry points, not the whole picture.

Its mandate tracks the seven sectors the CANEX programme covers — film and television, music, sports, fashion, literature, food, and visual arts — and then goes further, into industries where IP sits at the centre of the business: technology, life sciences, etc. Anywhere intellectual property is the core asset, CCInc can take a position. That this isn’t just talk is clear from the portfolio, which already reaches past film and music into literary IP, including Riding the Storm, the bank-commissioned account of Africa’s COVID-19 response, and Instances of Exceptional Moments of Hunger, a 2024 anthology from a CANEX writing workshop.

But it’s the other half of CCInc’s interest — not the IP itself, but the IP-rich technology companies that help creators make, sell, and keep it — that could bring the venture returns and long-term leverage it’s after. A quick clarification matters here: CCInc is an IP investor, not a builder of hard infrastructure. It isn’t looking to fund studios or venues; it’s looking for software and rights businesses where intellectual property is the asset. With that distinction in mind, three categories are worth evaluating closely.

The first is creator monetisation: platforms like Selar, Mainstack, Nestuge, Selfany, and Makerverse, which give African creators the means to sell their work and keep ownership rather than surrender it. These are the businesses that turn scattered audiences into recurring income, and ownership into something a creator can actually hold on to.

The second is film production and distribution infrastructure — the operational layer of the screen business. Here you have ventures like Filmmakers Mart, which the IFC and Sony’s innovation fund backed last year in the IFC’s first-ever African audiovisual investment; alongside players like Fusion Intelligence, whose software already runs more than half of West Africa’s cinemas and whose newer tools push real-time box office and royalty data to producers.

The third is music rights infrastructure, the least mature of the three. African music is now a real export — by Spotify’s own reporting, the platform paid out more than $38 million in royalties to Nigerian artists recently, most of it earned abroad. But streaming is only one income stream. Across performance, broadcast, and mechanical royalties, the continent’s collection infrastructure underperforms, and much of what creators are owed is neither tracked nor paid.

The technology in all three categories tends to be fluid. A tool built for filmmakers can find a second life in music or fashion, making a single solution relevant across industries. If CCInc is serious about African ownership, this is the layer that enables it at scale, and it is also where more African entrepreneurs should be building their businesses.

Already, CCInc has three public investments, and together they tell you more than any of them can alone.

The first was Muganga, a film about Dr Denis Mukwege, the Congolese physician and Nobel Peace laureate. The French-Belgian production had been fully financed through the French system before costs overran in post-production, leaving equity as the only route to completion. That’s where CCInc came in. With Angelina Jolie credited as an executive producer, the film opened theatrically in France last September, drew more than 300,000 admissions, posted the highest audience rating of any film since its release, and stayed in cinemas for over twenty-four weeks — rare for any film, rarer for an independent one. Akpata keeps a framed poster of it above his desk.

The second was Clarissa, which premiered at Cannes some weeks ago and is distributed by NEON, with Sophie Okonedo, Ayo Edebiri, David Oyelowo, and others in the cast. The third is the publishing catalogue of about 230 songs administered by Sony Music Publishing, composed or produced by Africans and the diaspora.

Muganga is the deal CCInc talks about most, but it’s perhaps the one that least resembles what the company says it wants to be. CCInc came in at the end, as the investor that rescued a film someone else had already made. Clarissa shows the thesis more clearly: a Nigerian story, co-financed with other institutional investors, with CCInc on the cap table early enough to shape the deal rather than salvage it. That is the model Akpata returns to when he describes what the company wants to be — the cheque that pulls other investors in, on African IP, with African ownership intact. It does not want to come in at the finish line to bail out post-production, even if it sometimes must. It does not want to be the only name on the cap table. There must be other partners in the room.

So, is CCInc’s breadth — seven sectors, plus life sciences, plus all that infrastructure beneath it — substantial or unfocused? The deals give a provisional answer. Substantial, but building its core in real time, and still learning which of its own stories to tell.

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4. No free lunches

There is a default mindset in the industry that Akpata mentioned without me prompting him. “Sometimes people think about a DFI, and they think it’s non-commercial grants and CSR,” he said. CANEX Creations is neither. It is commercial. It has to return capital to its shareholders, not just the principal, but a premium on top of it, enough to justify the cost of the money deployed.

This sounds like accounting, but it’s really a correction to the posture that has shaped African creative financing for some time. Too much of the capital that reached the sector arrived as gifts from donors, foundations, development agencies, and cultural budgets. Those gifts came with reporting requirements, but rarely with the one demand that forces commercial discipline and viability. So an entire ecosystem learned to ask how to receive money, and rarely how to return it. That is the systemic gap. Many people who take capital haven’t been required to think about where the return comes from, so they don’t.

This is the gap CCInc stands in, and why its commercial posture matters more than the size of any deal. By insisting on a return, the company rejects the narrative that creative capital is charity, betting instead that impact and commercial success can be the same.

This is why CCInc can’t fix the industry on its own. When you have to return your investors’ money with profit on top, you can’t bet on promises and goodwill — only on a plan that shows a path to profitability. CCInc isn’t a seed investor; it doesn’t back ideas or pre-revenue companies. It wants a track record — released films, operating businesses, revenue that already exists. So, if much of the sector is still venture-stage and institutional money won’t engage until you’re past that, the gap between the two is wider than capital alone can close.

5. The hard thing about hard things

I asked Akpata what was actually hard about his job, and his response rested on two points that sound familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention.

The first is packaging. “You might look at a thousand proposals,” he said, “and there could be fifty that you would do, and then you end up doing twenty-five.” But what kills most of them is that they never show how the money comes back. As he put it, there’s limited understanding in the industry of how to put a package together for a financier — “how they’re going to get their money back.”

Entrepreneur and adviser Marie Lora-Mungai echoes this point in her book, Creative Cash Flow:

“I believe that we have solved the demand side of the equation: investors are now ready and willing to deploy capital in the African creative industries. But while we were busy advocating for creatives to be taken seriously, we forgot to make sure that these same creatives were ready to access and digest this funding. Today, there’s more capital waiting to move into this sector than there are investment-ready businesses to receive it.”

That is the point. Shortage of capital, as CCInc is proving, is no longer the biggest problem. It’s the fact that there aren’t enough businesses in the ecosystem to absorb it.

We at Communiqué are also doing our bit to help solve this problem, primarily through our publication and partnerships — a case in point being our recent partnership with TM Global’s Technology Media Foundation for the first cohort of the Creative Investment Readiness Program. This is the kind of work the industry needs more of — accelerators and venture-building programmes that turn promising creators into investment-ready businesses CCInc can actually back.

The second challenge is structural. The continent’s distribution and monetisation infrastructure constrains how much any piece of IP can earn. Akpata used music to illustrate: a well-known musician once told him that a million streams pays roughly £4,000 in the UK, about $4,000 in the US, and around $300 in Nigeria. The gap isn’t mysterious — a Nigerian streaming subscription might cost a dollar and some change compared to $15 in the US, and the advertising pool behind the free tier is a fraction of the size of the US pool. The same logic bleeds into film: too few cinemas, limited internet connectivity, thin box-office windows. The content can be excellent and still hit a ceiling imposed by the market itself.

If you’ve read Communiqué 60, you know why I find this the most important part of the conversation. I have argued that African media will keep stuttering until it stops treating commercial sustainability as someone else’s problem, that the sector needs more product thinking, not charity, and businesses built to earn rather than to be funded. Akpata describes the same issue from the investor’s perspective. The packaging problem is a product-thinking conundrum. The distribution problem is the reason even good products struggle to move the needle. CCInc’s capital alone won’t fix either problem, and Akpata, to his credit, doesn’t pretend it will.

6. What does success look like?

So I asked Akpata the long question: five to ten years out, what will success look like for CCInc? His answer came in three parts.

First, creators should be able to monetise their IP in many ways. He used a Nigerian filmmaker as an example: someone who can recoup a meaningful share of a film’s cost from theatrical release at home and across several African markets, then stack streaming and broadcast deals, and more streaming windows after that, earning for years from a single film. For that to work, the domestic market has to be strong enough to carry the film; the international push should supplement it, not be its lifeline. This is why pullbacks, exits, and the shuttering of major streaming platforms have hurt the ecosystem and will continue to do so.

Second, more African ownership of African IP. Far too many African creators (including some of the legends we cherish, even their estates) do not own their intellectual properties. They’ve either pawned them off or surrendered control due to ignorance or a lack of leverage. Akpata hopes that the work his company is doing will help turn the tide.

Third, more institutional players in the room. This is the Clarissa logic again: CCInc as an enabler, not sole funder, building toward a coalition of other local and international investors on terms that keep ownership at home.

The vision is coherent and generous, but it also relies heavily on several other actors to play their roles. For creators to earn from their IP again and again, distribution channels must exist, and the ecosystem is still struggling to build them. For Africans to retain ownership of their work, creators need the bargaining power that financing brings, which the sector is still assembling. And for more investors to join in, they need to see real returns first — numbers that prove the bets pay off.

The vision is appealing. But it is also a chain, and Africa’s most ambitious creative economy investor holds only some of the links.

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“Back in the day when red carpets were new things, there was a photographer I knew. If he ever took a picture of me, he would show me first because he knew I was always looking out to make sure nobody was taking my picture. He would always sneak a picture, then come up and say, ‘I got you.’ But he would never post it or use it.”

For most of his career, Enyi Omeruah has preferred to stay out of the frame. In an industry obsessed with visibility, he built a life around being useful instead. While artists chased audiences, producers chased financing, and executives chased influence, Omeruah quietly developed a different skill: connecting people to opportunities.

Over the last two decades, that skill has taken him through almost every corner of Nigeria’s creative industries. He has managed musicians, supervised film soundtracks, raised money for movies, represented actors, connected writers to international opportunities, facilitated book adaptations, advised producers, and built relationships across Africa and beyond.

If you’ve heard of him, chances are somebody pointed you in his direction. He rarely points at himself. “I’ve just always stayed away because I wanted the clients to receive the spotlight,” he says. “That’s why they were there. My job was always in the background.”

In many ways, that instinct started long before he ever worked in entertainment. Omeruah grew up moving around Nigeria. His father was in the military, which meant a childhood split between Lagos, Kaduna, Enugu, and back again. But the more important influence may have been his mother.

She worked at the Nigerian Television Authority, where she created and produced Kiddies Junction, a children’s television programme intended to be Nigeria’s answer to Sesame Street. After school, Omeruah and his siblings would often end up at the television station. They appeared on programmes, sat around production sets, watched puppeteers at work and spent time around cameras.

Most children would have been fascinated by what was happening in front of the camera. Omeruah was more interested in what was happening behind it. “I would always look into the control booth,” he recalls. “I was wondering what was happening there. What was happening behind the camera, not necessarily what was happening in front of it.” That curiosity never left him.

But curiosity and career are often two different things. Like many children raised in strict African homes, creative ambitions did not seem practical. By the time he left Nigeria for university in the United States, entertainment was not on the table. He enrolled in accounting instead. “I changed to accounting because I thought it was the easiest of all the options that I had.” He graduated, found work, and spent the next seven years in the profession. But he hated it.

What kept him going during those years was a growing fascination with the entertainment business itself. He spent hours in bookstores reading copies of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, trying to understand how films were financed, how labels operated, how talent relationships worked, and who actually made the important decisions behind the scenes. At church, he spent time with the musicians. In recording studios, he watched producers work. Whenever he found himself among creative people, he was more interested in understanding the machinery behind them than in their performance.

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In 2004, Omeruah returned to Nigeria for his compulsory national service. Being back in Lagos shifted something in him. Even after a brief return to the United States, he knew he wanted to move back permanently, which he eventually did in 2006. A month later, his father died suddenly from a heart attack. Grief, it turns out, is clarifying. “That sort of shifts things. That makes you ask yourself, ‘What is life? What are you doing?’ It can flip on its head.”

Around the same period, he was spending evenings moving through Lagos’ live music circuit. Places like Bogobiri had become gathering points for musicians, poets and artists. One performer in particular caught his attention. A guitarist named Bez Idakula. “I remember thinking the world was his.”

Soon he discovered that Bez worked closely with Cobhams Asuquo, whom Omeruah already knew through family connections. The introductions were easy. The relationship developed naturally. What came next became a pattern that would define much of Omeruah’s career. He simply started connecting dots. That meant looking for more places and people to speak to who could help platform the musician. One of the people Omeruah reached out to was Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, the founder and convener of ArtX; at the time, she was working at Hennessy and trying to put together musical programming for the drink manufacturer’s music platform, Hennessy Artistry. That opportunity proved massive for Bez; it introduced him to the mainstream conversation.

As Bez’s profile grew, Omeruah found himself doing more than making introductions. He was helping coordinate opportunities and manage relationships. Only later did he realise there was a name for what he was doing. “I realised, oh, I was doing a role called talent management.” The work expanded organically. He started managing aspects of Asuquo’s affairs and supporting younger musicians in the producer’s orbit who had not yet broken into the mainstream. He was doing all of this while simultaneously managing family responsibilities after his father’s death and trying to sustain other ventures, including a catfish farm.

Then another opportunity emerged much closer to home. His younger sister, Chioma Omeruah, better known today as Chigul, had started sending funny voice notes to friends on BlackBerry Messenger. Omeruah paid little attention at first. “I felt too good for it. She was my sister, and I was like she should shut up and go away.” But the recordings spread quickly, and before long brands were trying to reach her. Since she was based in Abuja while much of the entertainment industry remained concentrated in Lagos, Omeruah gradually stepped in to help manage those relationships. And that’s how he found himself managing comic talent alongside musicians.

By now Omeruah was beginning to understand his real talent was helping artists navigate systems. Film entered his life almost by accident.

He watched a trailer for Before 30 and immediately became annoyed. The visuals were distinctly Nigerian. The music underneath them was not. “I was like, you can’t tell me they couldn’t find Nigerian music.” Through a childhood friend in the cast, he contacted the producers and offered to help for free. That introduction led to a relationship with the founders of Nemsia Studios, BB Sasore and Derin Adeyokunnu. He became a music supervisor, helping source music for projects like God Calling and Banana Island Ghost, often persuading artists to license songs without charging fees.

But another lesson was beginning to emerge. Talent needed opportunity, and to create opportunity, one needed money, and having money changed certain conversations. “I realised I would have more sway if I could raise money for these projects. I could raise a quarter of the budget and then softly insist that they use my [talent] Zainab Balogun for God Calling or somebody else for something else.”

Using the same relationship-driven approach that had shaped his work in music, he raised funding from friends, family and acquaintances. Some of the projects he worked on in this capacity include Ajuwaya. Even when projects did not generate strong financial returns, he maintained communication with investors and prioritised transparency. “The investor must be respected. The investor must be communicated with. Sometimes they’re not only there to make money. They’re there to be aligned with a great product.” That philosophy became central to how he approached business. Creative industries often celebrate vision and talent. Omeruah became equally interested in trust.

Over time, his world expanded beyond Nigeria. Film festivals, markets, and conferences took him to cities across Europe, North America, and Africa. He attended Cannes, the American Film Market, Berlin and Content London. Everywhere he went, he did the same thing he had done in Lagos; build relationships.

One of those relationships proved particularly important. At Content London, he connected with Odiri Iwuji, the commercial director of B2B media company C21 Media. In 2020, both men founded ChudorMMC, a management company specifically for African screenwriters. The idea was to connect writers and foreign producers seeking authentic African voices. They were successful at it, inking deals with global streamers like HBO and Apple TV.

Around this time, Omeruah also became quietly obsessed with the business of optioning books. “I believe our best stories are being told in prose. We can take those books and adapt them. And then fire up the sales of the books with great film and TV. It’s a whole ecosystem that could work together.” Essentially, he applied his expertise in connecting the right people in that part of the sector, linking publishers like Othuke Ominiabohs at Masobe Books with international producers, and introducing novelists like Adesuwa O’man to people who could turn their work into something more people could see.

Today, Omeruah is chairman of the board of the Realness Institute, a non-profit organisation that develops African screenwriters, producers, and creative executives. Writers come in with an idea, leave with a pilot script and a pitch deck, and are taken to Series Mania to pitch to network executives. He followed the organisation for years before getting the invitation to join the board. It is the kind of role that suits him: influential, connective, and largely invisible to the public.

He still avoids the spotlight when he can. But after nearly two decades spent helping creatives find audiences, funding, collaborators, and opportunity, Omeruah still measures success differently. “I have no money. I have people. And people trump money every time in the balance sheet of my life.”

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Editor's Note: This article has been updated. The previous version incorrectly stated that Enyi Omeruah worked on Lara and the Beat. He did not.

This essay is part of a series. If you missed the first part, you can read it here.

1. Counting the cost

Three years. Two dozen interviews. Hundreds of pages of transcripts. Multiple rounds of rewriting. That is what it took for Nigerian author and publisher Eghosa Imasuen to write The Challengers, a narrative non-fiction account of how a group of young people came together to build VFD Group into one of Nigeria’s most successful financial institutions.

In Communiqué 119, we defined the problem:

“Despite producing some of the continent’s most consequential companies over the last two decades, the African tech ecosystem has generated remarkably few book-length accounts of how those enterprises were built. The stories exist, but they are often fragmented across interviews, conference panels, podcasts, newsletters and news reports. Rarely are they assembled into a single narrative that captures not only what happened, but why it happened.

“This absence becomes increasingly striking as the ecosystem matures. The current iteration of Africa’s tech ecosystem now has its own generation of founders, investors, operators and institutions. It has produced several billion-dollar companies, landmark acquisitions, spectacular failures and defining regulatory battles. Yet many of these stories remain undocumented beyond the news cycle that first reported them.”

But it is one thing to notice that a canon is missing. It is another thing entirely to build one. The question we left unanswered is: what would it actually take to write these books into being, and to revive the kind of narrative non-fiction tradition that could carry them?

To begin answering it, Communiqué sat down with Eghosa Imasuen. He is, in one sense, an unusual person to ask, and in another, exactly the right one. He is both the novelist who has just produced a work of narrative non-fiction and the co-founder of Narrative Landscape Press, the publisher who must decide whether books like it are worth making at all. He sees the problem from both sides of the desk: the writer who does the work and the house that funds and tries to sell it.

2. How to kill a book

According to Imasuen, the first thing that needs to change is Nigeria’s litigious culture. Narrative non-fiction is the tradition in which the canon resides. It occupies the territory between the novel and the news report, using the tools usually reserved for fiction: scene, character, conflict, and the patient accumulation of detail, until a real-life account reads with the force and coherence of a fictional story.

Nigeria has a rich tradition of this kind of writing. During the military era, newspapers and magazines kept it alive under impossible conditions. Publications like Tell and Newswatch produced gripping, scene-driven accounts of power and its consequences. A good example is Tell magazine’s account of the final hours of former Head of State Gen. Sani Abacha.

But this tradition was strangled, first by government intimidation, then by a legal culture that made telling true stories about real people an act of financial recklessness. Private individuals discovered they could use the courts not to seek justice, but to delay publication indefinitely. In Nigeria, an injunction is easy to obtain and almost impossible to resolve quickly. That combination is lethal for books.

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Imasuen learned this firsthand in 2014, when he worked as the project manager for the publication of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s memoir, My Watch. Before the book could reach readers, a former associate of the President, Senator Buruji Kashamu, obtained a court injunction to stop its publication because he suspected the book contained comments that might be injurious to his person. A Federal High Court granted the injunction, and about 9,000 copies of the book were impounded at customs pending resolution of the suit.

Eventually, the courts struck out the case. But victory came at a cost. By the time the injunction was lifted, the publishers had accumulated ₦15 million ($91,000) in demurrage fees at the port. The lesson for publishers was hard to miss. Narrative non-fiction is already an expensive undertaking. It requires years of reporting, editing and fact-checking before a single book is sold. If a publisher must also factor in the possibility of lengthy legal disputes, impounded books and substantial financial losses, many will not take the risk.

In the absence of a strong narrative non-fiction tradition, another form has flourished: the memoir. Some of the most successful business books published in Nigeria in recent years have been memoirs. Books like Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede’s Leaving the Tarmac and Femi Otedola’s Making It Big, which has sold more than 65,000 copies, demonstrate that there is no shortage of audience appetite for stories about how institutions and fortunes are built.

But memoirs solve a different problem. A memoir is fundamentally a first-person account. The author controls the narrative and tells the story as he experienced it. A narrative non-fiction account by an independent author attempts something more ambitious. It reconstructs events from multiple perspectives, interviews participants, examines documents and seeks to understand not just how the protagonist remembers what happened, but how it happened.

That distinction matters because memoirs are generally less vulnerable to some of the legal and reporting challenges that accompany narrative non-fiction. The author is primarily speaking about his own experiences, decisions and observations. An independent narrative non-fiction writer, however, must make claims about other people, their motivations, their actions and the consequences of those actions. Every additional character introduces another potential source of dispute.

As a result, memoirs have become a safer vehicle for preserving business history. They tell important stories, but they rarely provide the kind of independent, multi-perspective account that ultimately forms the foundation of a canon.

3. The reputation flywheel

Even if the legal environment were more hospitable, a second problem would remain: access.

In Communiqué 119, we established that canonical books are built on access — that without the willingness of founders, early employees and investors to speak candidly, there is no book. What we did not examine is how that access is actually obtained. The answer, according to Imasuen, is less about skill than it is about status. “If Chimamanda Adichie wanted to tell the VFD story and I wanted to tell it, she would likely be the one that got the best access,” he told Communiqué.

Not necessarily because she is a better interviewer, but because her previous work has established credibility. People know the quality of the final product is likely to justify the time and vulnerability required. This creates a compounding effect. Great books lead to reputation. Reputation leads to access. Access leads to better books.

The problem is that Africa’s narrative non-fiction ecosystem has too few writers operating at that level. There are accomplished novelists, journalists, and biographers, but not enough people with a track record of producing deeply reported, book-length narratives about contemporary institutions. As a result, many of the continent’s most important founders, executives, and decision-makers rarely encounter writers whose reputations alone are enough to persuade them to open up.

In other words, building a canon is partly a talent problem but also a reputation problem. The ecosystem needs its first generation of successful narrative non-fiction writers. Their books will not only document important stories; they will create the credibility that makes future stories easier to access and tell. Once that flywheel begins to turn, access becomes less of an obstacle and more of a competitive advantage.

4. Someone has to pay for the truth

The final piece of the puzzle is the publisher. A writer can have the talent, the access, and a story worth telling, but someone still has to pay for the years of reporting before a single copy sells. That is the publisher’s role, but the appetite to publish these types of stories is only just beginning to emerge.

The economics of this will never be straightforward. When asked to make the commercial case for narrative non-fiction, Imasuen’s answer was disarmingly honest. “It is almost impossible to make a commercial case for these stories beyond the fact that there will always be people who want to read stories that are well told. I publish what I want to read, and believe strongly that there are many people like me who also want to read that work,” he said.

A publisher who waits for proof of demand will wait forever. The job is to recognise the gap and back the work anyway. That, in the end, is what building a canon takes. Not one fix but three: a legal culture that does not punish the truth, writers with the talent and standing to be let in, and publishers willing to fund books on conviction rather than certainty. The companies have been built. The stories are already there. What has been missing is the will to bear the cost and the risk of writing them down.

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Today, we’re introducing something we’ve been ruminating on and developing for some time: Creative Capital, a video essay series about the people, companies, and forces shaping Africa’s media and creative landscape. The first episode premieres next week on our YouTube channel.

Each episode takes one theme — the economics of a successful podcast, the strategy behind a breakout film, the money behind a revolutionary art fair, what it actually takes to build a cinematic universe — and works through it carefully, using data, reporting, and the perspectives of people doing the work on the ground.

Creative Capital is an extension of what we’ve built over the past six years: longform, data-driven, narrative essays. Now you can watch them.

Here’s why we’re doing it this way.

For the past few years, video podcasts have become the default way to spotlight remarkable people and their stories. They lean heavily on the host and subject’s ability to connect. For instance, to understand why Mavin Records keeps thriving after two decades in an industry where most labels lose their lustre to internal conflict, you’d tune into an hour-long conversation with Don Jazzy or Tega Oghenejobo. To learn how The Black Book became a breakout film with massive returns, you’d likely put Editi Effiong on the mic. To understand what role investors and funders play in shaping the future of media in Africa, you’d have to sit one or two of them.

That format works, and there’s a reason it has become the norm. But there’s room for variety. That’s the gap Creative Capital fills — we tell the bigger stories and connect the dots through a single editorial lens.

The first episode drops next week. Subscribe to our YouTube channel now so you don’t miss it.

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“To run Brila the way my father did will be me failing because that was purely radio. My duty is to run Brila in a different way, but excel in a way that also pleases my board and my predecessor, and the people who know about the history of the business.”

There are many ways to inherit a legacy. You can be groomed for it from childhood, spend years preparing for the eventual handover, and walk into the role believing it was always yours. Debbie Izamoje Okolie’s story is different. When people hear her surname, they often assume the succession was inevitable. Her father, Larry Izamoje, is one of the most recognisable figures in Nigerian media. He founded Brila FM in 2002 and built it into the country’s most influential sports radio station. But for years, the younger Izamoje wanted nothing to do with the station.

In fact, there was a time when the mere suggestion that she might one day work at Brila was enough to earn an immediate rejection. “I was like, God forbid. I would never.” Today, she is the CEO of Brila FM and is orchestrating the transition from a single radio station to Brila Media Group, a suite of media products that has expanded the company well beyond terrestrial audio.

Izamoje Okolie grew up inside the world she would eventually inherit. Her parents made sure that she and her siblings understood the value of working hard and of surviving in the world on their own. “We would do internships with their businesses. If you needed something, you would get paid for chores. They were very big on instilling work values in the three of us.”

For Izamoje Okolie, this arrangement meant she could always be by her father’s side at work. “I was a daddy’s girl even though I love my mom so much. For most of my internships, I used to kind of force myself to be placed within his own business, which at the time was Brila FM.”

At the time, sports radio in Nigeria was still a relatively new concept. There were only a handful of radio stations in Lagos, so Brila occupied a unique place in the industry, with athletes and sports personalities like Kanu Nwankwo and Jay-Jay Okocha as regular guests.

While most people saw these football stars through television screens and newspaper headlines, Izamoje Okolie saw them as people trying to live their lives despite being in the public eye. She saw their frustrations after a difficult game and heard stories that never made it into the papers. Without realising it, she was learning one of the most important lessons in media: the public story is rarely the complete version.

Those experiences sparked an interest in communication and storytelling. Izamoje Okolie wanted to study journalism, but her father disagreed, insisting that she study Information Management at the University of Sheffield instead. It would not be the last time her father influenced the direction of her life; after Sheffield came a master’s degree from University College London. Then executive programmes and certificates—Harvard, MIT, one qualification after another. “This was just my father pouring information down my brain and ensuring that I was prepped for the world ahead.”

But despite all that preparation, Brila was nowhere in her plans. Along with her sisters, she had been raised to understand that they were expected to build things for themselves. There was also a perception attached to family businesses at the time. Today, succession is often celebrated. Children taking over family businesses are viewed as custodians of institutions. That was not always the case. “When I was younger, there was this stigma around working in family businesses. People saw it as not being able to stand on your own.” To Izamoje, joining Brila felt less like an opportunity and more like a surrender, so she set out to build something of her own.

Entrepreneurship came naturally to her. At ten years old, she was selling handmade beads after church services. When her school taught students how to make dishwashing soap, she tried selling that too. “Anything that I could sell, I would sell.” She channelled that instinct into a communications agency called Image Boosters. Her friends, who were returning to Nigeria to launch businesses, needed help with public relations, branding, and digital communications. Izamoje Okolie already possessed many of the technical skills they needed. Her university training had exposed her to web design, information systems, and digital communication. She stepped in to help. One after another, clients began to arrive; soon, it was an established business.

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Image Boosters specialised in helping established companies communicate with younger audiences. Many of its clients were legacy institutions trying to navigate a changing media environment. They needed websites, digital strategies, social media campaigns and branding support. In many ways, the company was solving the same problem that would define her work at Brila. How do established institutions remain relevant in a changing world?

But her father had a plan to bring her back to Brila, and it started with hiring Image Boosters. On paper, it looked like any other engagement. The agency would help the company strengthen its digital presence and think beyond radio. There were websites to build, campaigns to run, social media channels to grow and a younger audience to reach. But the work placed Izamoje inside the business like never before, and her father continued to encourage her participation.

“He would say, ‘You can’t just be my client and stay in your own office. You need to have an office space here.’” So she got an office in the Brila Headquarters. Then she started attending marketing meetings. Then executive meetings and strategy discussions. Before she realised what was happening, she had become the company’s COO in 2020.

As Izamoje Okolie became more involved in Brila, Image Boosters began to occupy less of her attention. For a while, she tried to do both. It quickly became clear that she could not. Then came COVID-19. The pandemic forced her to reassess where she was spending her time and energy. During that period, she gathered the Image Boosters team and told them what she already knew. “My heart, my dreams, my strategies, everything looks like it’s no longer here.” Some members of the team transitioned into Brila. Others moved on to new opportunities. Image Boosters was never formally shut down, but it ceased to be the centre of her professional life. The succession she once resisted was now complete.

Yet taking over the family business presented a different challenge. Many successors treat preservation as success. They inherit a business and dedicate themselves to maintaining what already exists. Izamoje Okolie believes that approach misunderstands the assignment.

Larry Izamoje’s Brila was built for a different era; a radio station operating in a world where radio sat at the centre of sports conversations. The media landscape Debbie Izamoje Okolie is operating in is markedly different. Audiences move fluidly between platforms. Communities are built online. Sports content competes not just with other sports content, but with every other form of entertainment. For Brilla to remain relevant, it had to become something bigger than a radio station.

Today, Brila FM sits within the larger Brila Media Group. Alongside broadcasting, the company now operates an intelligence and research unit, a sports marketing agency, and a growing portfolio of digital products and experiences. Brila has also embraced the concept of “sportainment”, the idea that sports extend beyond what happens on the pitch. For Izamoje Okolie, sports culture includes music, lifestyle, personalities, fandom and community. This explains why Brila increasingly shows up at events, creating physical experiences that bring audiences closer to sports. “We want a case where you can experience Brila in person.”

The ambition extends beyond Nigeria. Izamoje Okolie sees Brila as a Pan-African sports media company. The future she imagines includes deeper engagement with sports ecosystems across the continent, from Ghana to South Africa and Morocco.

But some of her most important work is happening outside the company. In 2023, ahead of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Brila organised outreach programmes to encourage interest in women’s football. During one of those visits, a young girl made a statement that stayed with her. “But football is not for girls. It’s for boys.” Football Girls Africa is her attempt at changing that perception. The initiative introduces young girls to opportunities across sports, not only as athletes but also as journalists, marketers, administrators, and executives.

The same motivation has drawn Izamoje Okolie into wider sports-ecosystem work, including roles with the Nigerian Women’s Football League, the Esports Federation of Nigeria, and other sports organisations. At first glance, these commitments may seem unrelated, but they are expressions of the same belief: that Nigeria’s sports industry can become significantly larger than it is today if the right people commit themselves to building it.

That conviction is what ultimately frees her from the burden of succession. Most successors spend years trying to escape comparisons with their predecessor. Izamoje Okolie takes a different approach. She largely ignores them. “The thing with succession is that you cannot really focus on the expectations of other people.” Nor, she argues, can you spend too much time trying to satisfy your predecessor. Different eras demand different answers. In many ways, this is the final twist in her story.

The young lady who once recoiled at the thought of joining the family business eventually became its leader. But she arrived at this point by exercising her independence, not abandoning it. She looked at a successful institution and concluded that preserving it would not be enough. It had to evolve.

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Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of the subject’s name and company name.

1. A challenging story

In July, Nigerian author and publisher, Eghosa Imasuen, will release The Challengers, his third book and his first in more than a decade. Known for his novels, Fine Boys and To Saint Patrick, The Challengers is Imasuen’s first foray into narrative non-fiction. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, the book follows the journey of five friends who leave their jobs to start the VFD Group and grow it into a multi-billion-naira fintech.

The Challengers captures a moment when a generation of ambitious young professionals looked at the aftermath of a global economic collapse and saw opportunity. Their story unfolds alongside broader shifts in Nigeria’s financial services industry, creating a corporate record of how an institution, and the people behind it, emerged from a particular moment in time.

Despite producing some of the continent’s most consequential companies over the last two decades, the African tech ecosystem has generated remarkably few book-length accounts of how those enterprises were built. The stories exist, but they are often fragmented across interviews, conference panels, podcasts, newsletters and news reports. Rarely are they assembled into a single narrative that captures not only what happened, but why it happened.

This absence becomes increasingly striking as the ecosystem matures. The current iteration of Africa’s tech ecosystem now has its own generation of founders, investors, operators and institutions. It has produced several billion-dollar companies, landmark acquisitions, spectacular failures and defining regulatory battles. Yet many of these stories remain undocumented beyond the news cycle that first reported them. The industry has failed to produce canons that bind all these stories into a shared history.

2. But what exactly is a canon?

The term canon originally referred to the rules and texts that defined religious communities. Over time, it came to mean the books, ideas, and works considered essential within an intellectual or professional community. Beyond a mere reading list, a canon is a form of collective memory.

They emerge when a community has accumulated enough shared experience to look back on its own history and decide which stories are worth preserving. It looks backwards, preserving the record of how a community came to be, and forwards, ensuring that future generations inherit the lessons, myths, triumphs, and mistakes of those who came before them.

The existence of a canon is therefore a sign of maturity. It suggests that an industry has moved beyond the immediacy of building and has begun the work of interpretation. Over the years, this has happened in Silicon Valley; a collection of books that collectively explain how that ecosystem was built has been written. Some chronicle the rise of individual companies (The Everything Store) and founders (Steve Jobs). Others document the emergence of venture capital (Secrets of Sand Hill Road), the personal computer revolution (Fire in the Valley), the dot-com boom (The New New Thing), or the workings of startups (The Hard Thing About Hard Things). Taken together, they form a shared historical record that allows founders, investors, employees and observers to understand where the industry came from and to develop a deeper understanding of the ideas, decisions and cultural norms that shaped the ecosystem.

The influence of the Silicon Valley canon extends far beyond the Valley itself. In China, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun has credited Fire in the Valley, Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger’s history of the personal computer revolution, as an early inspiration. Before building Stripe, the Collison brothers read several books in the Silicon Valley canon while growing up in Ireland. Patrick Collison has publicly shared reading lists covering many of these texts. Even in Nigeria, the Silicon Valley canon holds sway. Home service startup, Eden Life made reading and discussing books from this canon like Working Backwards, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr’s account of the Amazon management philosophy, part of the leadership team’s weekly routine. Also, when Njoku Emmanuel shut down his crypto startup, Lazerpay, in 2023, one of the books he turned to was The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz’s memoir on navigating the challenges of startup building.

Yet there are no books rooted in local context that an embattled founder like Njoku Emmanuel could turn to for guidance. No definitive account of the rise of Nigerian fintech. No book on CcHub and its 2010s cluster of startups. No history of MainOne and the internet cable that enabled most of those startups.

To be fair, there have been attempts at creating these accounts. Russell Southwood’s Africa 2.0 documents how mobile phones and the internet became accessible to millions across sub-Saharan Africa. In Leaving the Tarmac, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede recounts how he grew Access Bank into a continental banking giant alongside his late business partner, Herbert Wigwe. Also, in 2023 Voltron Capital founder Olumide Soyombo released Vantage, a memoir of his investing journey and role in helping incubate startups such as Piggyvest. The book became the third best-selling non-fiction title in Nigeria in both 2023 and 2024, according to Open Country Mag bestseller rankings.

Increasingly, there appears to be demand for such stories. “Nigerians are becoming more interested in non-fiction personal stories—not just of global figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or Steve Jobs, but of their own leaders,” Anwuli Ojogwu, Imasuen’s co-founder at Narrative Landscape Press, told Communiqué last year. The question, then, is not whether people want these books. It is why so few of them have been written.

3. Big questions require big answers

Part of the answer is that African technology is still a relatively young ecosystem. Only now has enough time passed for participants to reflect on its history. Until recently, the founders best positioned to write these accounts were occupied with the immediate demands of building companies, raising capital, and scaling products. More importantly, many of the ecosystem’s pioneers have not yet completed their story arcs. Writing a definitive account of Flutterwave today, for instance, would feel premature without knowing how the story ultimately ends. You cannot canonise an unfinished story.

Then there is the question of access. Canonical books are built on information that was not previously available to the public. In some cases, the writer has lived through the events themselves. “Africa 2.0 was a summary of 25 years of working in the communications industry on the continent. This gave me the experience to know some of the key players, and where I didn’t, I knew someone who did,” Russell Southwood told Communiqué.

Where the writer lacks first-hand experience, they must be willing to spend years with a subject, and the subject must be willing to grant access not only to themselves but to investors, former employees, emails and internal documents. Walter Isaacson spent two years shadowing Steve Jobs, conducting over 40 exclusive interviews, supplementing these talks by staying on and off at Jobs’s Palo Alto home and speaking with more than a hundred of his colleagues, friends and competitors. Such access can be uncomfortable. Canonical books are rarely polite histories; they examine failures, betrayals, power struggles, regulatory battles and costly mistakes. Few founders are willing to open themselves up in that way. The Challengers only exists because Imasuen leveraged a pre-existing relationship with the VFD founders.

Academia can also play a role. Some of the most important accounts of technology ecosystems emerge from researchers seeking to understand how industries evolve. Money Real Quick, a study of how M-Pesa transformed Kenya through mobile money, was written by Tonny Omwansa of the University of Nairobi and Nicholas Sullivan of Tufts University’s Fletcher School.

Even with access, writing these books requires time and money. A serious narrative history can take years of reporting, yet Africa’s media economics rarely support projects of that scale. Money Real Quick was supported by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, while Southwood drew on the resources of his consultancy, Balancing Act, to produce Africa 2.0. The market for such books may be growing, but the institutions, incentives, and financial backing needed to produce them consistently are only beginning to emerge.

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4. Market forces

Ultimately, producing more canonical books requires a market that can sustain them. “To have books, you need to have a reading culture, and with some notable exceptions, that audience is quite small on the continent. Those readers also need to be interested in where we come from and where we are going,” Southwood said.

Until now, many of the closest things the African tech ecosystem has produced to canonical accounts have largely been self-funded projects by founders wealthy enough to underwrite the cost without worrying about whether the book would sell. But The Challengers suggests an audience may finally be emerging.

This creates opportunities across the ecosystem. For journalists, it presents the chance to create the definitive histories the industry lacks. There are already writers who fit the bill. Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega, former editor-in-chief of TechCabal and publisher of Notadeepdive, has reported extensively on Jumia and is perhaps best positioned to write a definitive account of the e-commerce giant. Fu’ad Lawal’s long-form account of the Paystack story similarly contains the raw material for a book-length treatment.

The opportunity extends to media organisations as well. Publications such as TechCabal and Techpoint have spent years building archives of interviews, investigations and reporting that could serve as the foundation for future books. For publishers, the opportunity may be even greater. Unlike literary fiction, where the market is already relatively established, African tech narrative non-fiction remains largely unexplored territory. A publisher that succeeds in creating this category could occupy the same position that business publishers like Harvard Business Review Press occupy abroad. More importantly, publishers do not need to wait for these books to arrive in their inboxes. They can commission them: identify significant companies, founders and industries, and pair them with capable writers.

The African tech ecosystem has spent the last two decades building companies, products, and institutions. The next challenge may be documenting how all of that happened. Because industries are not only shaped by the people who build them, but by the stories we tell about how they were built.

What does it take to make this happen? We will break this down in the next essay.

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“The way I practice my journalism is to go as close as possible to the source. It’s an influence of my anthropological training, where we go into the field.”

In April 2014, that instinct took Chika Oduah to Chibok, a northeastern town in Nigeria.

Boko Haram had just kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the Government Secondary School, and most articles being published about it were being filed from Abuja, Lagos, London, New York, or Washington. At the time, no journalists had actually gone to Chibok. An editor at The Guardian reached out to Oduah and asked if she could write something. She looked at the coverage and immediately saw the gap.

She had been attending the Bring Back Our Girls rallies in Abuja and had connected with a man from Chibok who had not been back to his hometown in years. He became her guide. They hired a car and drove fourteen hours north, through increasingly remote and deserted terrain, until they arrived. When they did, she crossed paths with Adam Nossiter, the New York Times correspondent, who had come the same day with politicians and a large entourage. Oduah had come differently. “I like to travel low-key,” she says. “Wear a hijab, speak my small Hausa, and just go.” A local businessman offered her a bed for the night. Before he left her to sleep, he pointed to a machete by the wall and told her to use it if she heard anything. She did not sleep easily. But she got the story.

It was not a one-off. The story of terrorism and its aftermath became a major thread running through her career, one she would return to again and again. But more than any single assignment, Chibok captures something essential about how Oduah works, and why she has spent years building a journalism practice that many of her peers in international media have never attempted.

For most foreign correspondents covering Nigeria and Africa, the job is done at a distance. Stories about the continent are filed from comfortable newsrooms, stitched together from wire copy and phone calls. Oduah has never seen the point of this. She has spent her career working with international media organisations while insisting on doing the reporting on the ground, where the story actually happens. That conviction made her turn her back on a career in the United States and move to Nigeria. It is what now guides her as she builds her own platform, ZIKORA Media & Arts African Cultural Heritage Organisation. To understand where it comes from, you have to go back to a small village on the banks of the River Niger.

Oduah was born in Ogbaru, a rustic community sitting on those banks, as the first daughter of her parents. Life in the village was busy and full of nature.

At two years old, she relocated with her family to the United States, settling in Georgia — a state that, with its sprawling greenery and slower pace, carried some of the same rural texture as the village she had left behind. As the first female child, she was expected to be many things at once. That sense of doing several things at the same time stayed with her. “I was raised to be a multitasker. It is why I wear many hats.”

But Georgia was not Ogbaru, and America was not home. Even as a child, Oduah felt the dissonance acutely. “I felt like a fish out of water,” she says. “The US was not for me. It was a country of corporate slavery and capitalism stripped of humanity. I saw all of this when I was about eight years old and told my parents I was not going to stay.”

Growing up, she was an inquisitive, creative child. She read, drew, danced, and wrote poetry. By her teenage years, she had started writing articles on current affairs. She had so many interests it was difficult to choose: fashion design, anthropology, fiction writing, activism. Her parents nudged her toward journalism. Her mother first suggested it, and her father convinced her she did not need to be on television to do it. She could write. That was all she needed.

At sixteen, Oduah walked into her first newsroom, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the most prestigious papers in the American Southeast. It was there that she began to understand what the craft demanded. She went on to study Journalism and Anthropology at Georgia State University, embracing the multimedia approach that was being pushed hard at the time — learning to write, shoot, edit video, record audio, and produce. It helped that CNN’s headquarters sat a few minutes from her campus. Inspiration was always within walking distance.

In those early years, the stories she wrote were almost always about immigrants and marginalised voices. After graduating, she got a spot in NBC News’s training program for early-career journalists. But before that, she had spent time in Kenya, working at K24: the country’s first twenty-four-hour news station, drifting from place to place doing documentary and feature work. It was her first real taste of on-the-ground journalism on the continent, and she loved every moment of it.

Back in New York, she joined Sahara Reporters as a creative director, helping build what was then an ambitious attempt at a pan-African television broadcast station. In 2012, she was accepted into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, a recognition of the literary ambitions she had never fully set aside.

After she left Sahara Reporters, she decided to return to Nigeria. Her mother cried when she announced she was leaving the US, but her father was supportive. “He was like, that’s my girl. He always loved my go-getter spirit.”

In 2013, she moved to Abuja. The choice was deliberate; Al Jazeera had a permanent West Africa bureau in the city. She had been applying from the United States, but the emails and calls had not been taken seriously. When she showed up in person at the Abuja office, they finally understood she was serious and offered her a job as a producer for the West African region.

As producer, Oduah was responsible for everything: pitching stories to Doha, organising news teams, arranging fixers, conducting risk assessments, going into the field, helping to write scripts and edit the final product. The role of TV news producer, along with writing news stories for Al Jazeera’s website, took her across Nigeria and into neighbouring countries. She covered the farmer-herder conflict in the Middle Belt, the Benue massacres, and communities in the northeast living under the shadow of Boko Haram. “I have been able to travel across Nigeria more than people who have lived there their whole life.”

After leaving Al Jazeera, she worked as a freelance journalist covering West Africa for several international media organizations including Vice, Voice of America and France 24. It was during this period she found her way to Chibok.

In 2017, she moved to Senegal. The reasons were layered. The first was safety; her reporting on Boko Haram had made certain people unhappy, and she needed distance. The second was language; most West African countries are francophone, and she needed French to cover the region properly. The third was art. Senegal has a deep, living tradition of artistic practice, and she wanted to immerse herself in it.

But it was her frustrations with the international media industry that eventually pushed her to build something of her own. There was the outlet that planned to cover a Nigerian election without telling the only Nigerian on the team. There were the organisations that did not like her dreadlocks and wanted her to look a certain way on camera. And then there was a YouTube video of a Burkinabé mystic and spiritual philosopher named Patrice Malidoma, a man who had spent his life bridging African spiritual traditions and the Western world. In the middle of the video, Malidoma stopped and said, seemingly out of nowhere, that someone was listening who had not been brought to Africa to report on bad news, but to find solutions. Oduah got chills. Shortly after, she learned that Malidoma had died.

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She started ZIKORA Media and Arts African Cultural Heritage Organization in 2023. The name means “show the world” in Igbo. “Africans still apologise for being African,” she says. ZIKORA is her attempt to change that, through journalism, literature, performance, and events.

Looking ahead, Oduah talks about ZIKORA the way a young reporter talks about her first big story: as something whose full shape she cannot yet see, but whose direction she is sure of. There is more of the continent to cover, more voices to find, but she wants those voices to speak for themselves.

It is the same instinct that put her in a car for fourteen hours to Chibok, that walked her into the Al Jazeera office in person. The instinct to go close, to go in person, and to show the world whatever she finds there.

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Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect corrections to names, titles, and contextual details.

1. Welcome to the clipping economy

You’ve probably become familiar with the format by now. You open X and the first thing you see is a short video from your favourite podcast. Maybe it is I Said What I Said with Jola Ayeye and FK Abudu mid-laugh about a dilemma sent in by one of their listeners. Maybe it is The Honest Bunch, with a presidential candidate explaining his policy initiatives. It might even be Afrobeats Intelligence, with Joey Akan dissecting the finer details of a label deal involving your favourite artist. Or maybe the clip is not from a podcast at all. Maybe it is from a church service, a concert, or the morning segment of a TV show.

Whatever it is, you almost certainly did not go looking for it. The account that posted is not one you follow, and is run by a person you cannot name. Congratulations. You have just experienced the clipping industry.

Clippers are largely anonymous social media accounts whose sole purpose is to rack up views. They take a piece of long-form content — an hour-long livestream, a podcast, a sermon, a press conference — and pull out the most exciting, controversial, or emotionally charged moments. Some are dedicated operations. Others are existing media or entertainment pages that creators and companies quietly recruit to help push their content. The clippers themselves can be based anywhere in the world: a teenager in Ibadan, a 9–5 worker in Nairobi, a university student in Accra. Geography is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that the clip travels.

And increasingly, this is how most people now experience content on the internet: not as complete works consumed intentionally, but as fragments engineered by strangers to drive engagement. Globally, an industry has begun to form around this behaviour. In Nigeria, however, it is still in its early stages.

2. Meet Nigeria’s most famous clipper

No one has come to exemplify the clipping industry in Nigeria quite like OneJoblessBoy. If you spend enough time on social media, particularly X, you will run into the account sooner or later. It is one of the clearest examples of how clipping in Nigeria has grown from casual posting into a real part of the media ecosystem.

Like many similar operations, OneJoblessBoy did not begin as a clipping account. It was the social media page for Onejoblessboy.com, a kind of online diary where the founder and his circle of friends published everyday stories, observations, and commentary in both English and Pidgin. The problem was that almost nobody was paying attention.

To drive engagement, they started posting things people already cared about: memes, concert recaps, throwback videos, football clips, anything people were already interested in. The plan was to build an audience first and then use that audience to drive their own distribution needs. “The idea is that things are shareable on social media, so we find things that people find interesting. Like a throwback video of Wizkid dancing, for example, and we bring it back, and we use that to build distribution, which we can now use for our articles,” the operator behind the OneJoblessBoy accounts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Communiqué.

As the accounts grew, brands, artists, and podcasters began to reach out for promotion. Some asked OneJoblessBoy to pick the best moments from long videos. Others came with clips and talking points already prepared. About 60% of what they now post comes from clients. The other 40% is content that the team finds on their own. OneJoblessBoy is now run by two full-time employees, with several unpaid contributors. According to the team’s spokesperson, what makes content go viral is usually emotional tension. Topics like marriage, migration, money, and politics tend to perform because they connect directly to the lives of young Nigerians.

There is no flat rate for any of this. Pricing is negotiation-based and shifts depending on who is asking. The most the account has charged for a single post is around ₦100,000 ($73). Across the broader market, clippers tend to charge between ₦30,000 and ₦200,000 per post. The real money, though, sits in bulk deals. When a brand wants a clipper to post a series of videos, those campaigns are negotiated as packages, often with content calendars worked out jointly with the clipper. But these rates apply to established clipping operations. Smaller clippers are paid in kind with concert tickets, hotel stays, etc. Clippers who are monetised also rely on platform payouts as part of their income.

3. Worldwide clippers

In contrast to Nigeria, a dedicated clipping industry has already begun to develop globally into a structured creator economy segment. In March 2025, social commerce platform Whop launched dedicated clipping products designed to formalise the practice and make it easier for creators and advertisers to coordinate clip distribution campaigns. Around the same period, platforms like CLIPPING also emerged, turning clipping into a performance-based marketplace where creators and brands can pay armies of clippers to flood TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X with short-form content. One campaign on CLIPPING offered clippers $150 for every 100,000 views generated. According to the company’s founder, more than 62,000 clippers now use the platform, earning an average of roughly $3,000 per month.

In October 2025, YouTuber MrBeast launched Vyro, a clipping marketplace under his Viewstats company. Vyro pays roughly $3 per 1,000 views, with payouts capped at $1,000 per post, depending on the campaign.

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4. Who owns the viral moment?

If the clipping industry looks more organised abroad, what exists in Nigeria is still haphazard and in its early stages. There are no rules of engagement to guide the practice. For the most part, clippers use whatever videos they can find, cut out whatever moments seem most likely to drive engagement, and post them as quickly as possible.

According to OneJoblessboy’s spokesperson, the point of clipping is not to replace the original work but to send people back to it. The idea is to find the part of a long video that generates enough curiosity, tension, or excitement to make viewers want to watch the full thing. “Clipping should be able to extend the shelf life of a video, not shorten it,” he told Communiqué. But that logic has often clashed with the people who make the original content.

Many creators believe clipping does the opposite of what it claims to do. Instead of driving viewers to the full episode, they argue, it gives audiences just enough of the good parts that they no longer feel the need to watch the longer version. In a media environment where views, ad revenue, and direct audience attention are already hard to win, that can feel less like promotion and more like extraction.

This tension came into public view in January, when YouTuber Korty EO complained about the practice, “I know you guys are trying to eat. But if you bring my entire video to post here, what will I eat? I don’t need you to credit me. All I ask is that you don’t post 7 clips from one video.” Her frustration captured the central copyright and ownership problem inside Nigeria’s clipping economy: creators may appreciate visibility, but that does not mean they want strangers slicing up their work without permission or limits.

That is the contradiction at the heart of clipping in Nigeria. Clippers often present themselves as growth partners. Many creators experience them as unauthorised middlemen. And because the industry is still so informal, there is very little in place to resolve those tensions. There are no clear standards on consent, takedowns, licensing, or fair use in practice.

The clipping industry raises difficult questions, even as it becomes harder to ignore. If the only thing that matters is producing more clips that travel, then the clip itself becomes more important than the work it was supposed to promote. The most emotionally charged 90 seconds begin to matter more than the full context of the interview. Over time, this has distorted how content gets made. Some creators now shape their work around what can be clipped, rather than what they actually want to say.

There is also the risk that audiences begin to lose interest in content that feels organic or slow. If everything is engineered for virality, the rougher, less optimised work that once made the internet feel human will gradually disappear. Indie artists are a good example. Part of what makes them interesting is that they are still developing in public, outside the pressure of mass appeal. But a system that rewards only the most instantly shareable moments leaves less room for that kind of gradual growth. This phenomenon is seeping into podcasts, interviews, comedy, politics, and even journalism. Clips flatten nuance, reward outrage over substance, and strip conversations of context.

Furthermore, because clippers operate with almost no oversight, the same systems that reward virality can also reward misinformation, manipulated edits, deepfakes, and politically motivated disinformation, especially during elections or moments of heightened public tension.

The market urgently needs structure. Clear takedown policies that creators can actually enforce, standardised pricing that does not leave smaller clippers paid in concert tickets, stronger copyright enforcement, and formal partnership frameworks between clippers and the creators whose work they redistribute.

None of this requires regulation. Whop, Vyro, and CLIPPING all exist because someone decided to build infrastructure around an emerging trend. We are now approaching the same inflection point in Nigeria’s creator ecosystem.

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“It has always just been me doing experiments my whole life, which is visible now in my adult life. Even my own career has been a big experiment.”

Lisa Muchangi is the kind of person who genuinely believes that the results of a well-designed experiment are always more useful than the comfort of sticking with what already exists. She has believed this since she was a teenager, teaching herself in the National Library in Nairobi’s Upper Hill while everyone else was in school.

A marketing, communications, and community strategist based in Nairobi, she was, until recently, the Marketing and Communications Manager at Baraza Media Lab, a role she held for five years, during which she organised four editions of the Africa Media Festival, one of the largest gatherings of media professionals on the continent.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Muchangi refused from a young age to accept instructions without understanding the reasoning behind them. “I wasn’t the type of child you would tell do this because I said so,” she says. “I would always be like, ‘Reason with me. Why? Make it make sense to me.’” Her parents — a former teacher and a banker — fed this instinct. They encouraged their children to be confident and seize opportunities. “My dad made me believe that I could literally be an astronaut if I wanted.”

In the first term of her second year of high school, Muchangi decided that she didn’t want to continue with the Kenyan curriculum. She was particularly bored, sitting through lessons on “the advantages of colonialism,” as she puts it. She proposed to her parents that she educate herself instead.

“My parents made me do a PowerPoint presentation to explain my plan,” she recalls. The pitch was that she would teach herself the British curriculum independently, sit the international exams, and, if the experiment failed, re-enter the traditional school system. “I told them, look, let’s do a six-month experiment. So at least they don’t feel the pressure of making a permanent decision.”

Her parents agreed. And every morning, when other children were heading to school, Muchangi’s parents dropped her off at the National Library in Nairobi’s Upper Hill area, where she spent entire days teaching herself. She did this for eight months, two beyond the original proposal, though her parents never pulled the plug. Her father and mother would check in on her between meetings to confirm that their daughter was actually doing what she said she was doing. She was. She sat her mock exams, did well, sat her final exams, did well, and walked away from the whole experiment with her high school certificate a few months shy of her sixteenth birthday.

That then became the crux of another problem. Muchangi had finished high school far too early to enter university. Her parents held this particular line. “I would have been swallowed by the university world at that age,” she concedes now. But for someone as industrious as she was, idle time was never really an option. She needed something to do, and managing events turned out to be the most obvious door.

She started small, with birthday parties, curated dinners, and milestone gatherings. The first real paying event was a Dora the Explorer-themed birthday party for a five-year-old. She got the gig via a referral from someone she knew — she had originally done a similar job for free, and word got around. She treated the paid job with the same seriousness. “I’m very big about protecting your name,” she says. “Whatever I touch, I make it beautiful.” From there, her reputation grew steadily, one client recommending her to the next, and the scope of each job kept getting slightly larger than the last.

It did not take long for her to turn her attention to weddings. The appeal was precisely the high stakes, because it demanded a level of rigour and contingency planning that pushed her to become better, faster. “People are very sensitive about weddings because everybody gets married with the hope that they’ll only get married once,” she explains. “It’s not like a birthday where maybe next year things will go better. You have a chance to make or break this person’s biggest day.”

She started with Nairobi-based weddings, then graduated to destination events: coastal venues, remote bush settings in Maasai Mara, locations that stripped away the familiar infrastructure and required her to run everything herself. Her first wedding was between an Italian woman and a Kenyan man, a cross-cultural event that she had convinced both families to trust her with.

By the time she turned eighteen, Muchangi was ready to take what she had learned organising social events and apply it somewhere new. She had been deliberately putting herself in rooms she didn’t technically need to be in — networking events and startup gatherings in Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah era — absorbing perspectives and watching how professional communities were convened. “I used to go to these networking events. I didn’t even care what event it was. I didn’t care whether it was about fintech or what. It didn’t matter. I was like, I’m here, I just want to be in these spaces.” The observation sharpened something in her thinking: she wanted to do more than social events. She wanted to design the kind of gatherings that built professional ecosystems.

Her first full-time job came at nineteen, at Ikigai Nairobi, a wellness-focused collective of co-working spaces. She was also in university at the time, juggling both. The role at Ikigai sat at the intersection of marketing and community building — exactly the territory she had been circling for years. There, she deepened her understanding of what it meant to grow a community not through advertising, but through care: making people feel so at home in a space that they couldn’t help but bring others in. “I’ve always been like, how do we get people to be so happy about these spaces that when we open a new one, and they tell their friends, you should join this community, without us having to do so much heavy lifting of convincing people to come on board,” she reflects.

It was her work at Ikigai that caught the attention of Baraza Media Lab. She did not apply. The role was created with her in mind, and she was approached directly. What drew her to say yes was the nature of the organisation itself. Baraza had been born out of research into the state of media in Kenya, and one of its founding premises was that the media ecosystem needed space for experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, that podcasters, filmmakers, and journalists were operating in silos, and that bringing them together in a physical, intentional community could change that. “I love that it was first of its kind,” Muchangi says. “And that it was highly experimental. It was an experiment with some initial funding that was like, okay, go forth and see what you’re going to make out of it.”

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She joined in the middle of COVID, which meant the job immediately required her to figure out how to keep a physical community alive during a period of forced distance. She grew the newsletter, hosted webinars, ran hybrid events, and organised a vaccination drive to bring media and creative workers in the area through the space. When in-person events became possible again, she had already developed a clear playbook for the transition. As the organisation grew, so did her role, which evolved from events to a full marketing and communications brief covering Baraza’s expansion into new counties across Kenya — Kisumu, Nakuru, and Mombasa, each requiring its own audience strategy built around the specific context and needs of that market.

The centrepiece of her time at Baraza was the Africa Media Festival, which she managed end-to-end across all four editions. The festival was born out of a collective frustration with the traditional conference format — the same panels, the same faces, the same regurgitation of ideas. “We got a bit very tired of conferences in the traditional format,” she says. “And Baraza is an experimental space by nature, so we must create space for experimentation and for novel ideas.”

The first edition was held at a hotel. The feedback from the community was immediate and clear: this feels like every other conference. By the second edition, they had moved to the outdoor grounds of the National Museums of Kenya, and the shift in atmosphere changed everything. “Something as small as venue, it may seem small, but it really does open up people. You feel like you can think.” The festival grew into a genuinely pan-African gathering built on formats designed to be useful: short ignite talks of eight to ten minutes, audience-led conversations, and hands-on workshops that attendees could take back and apply the following week.

The metric Muchangi cared most about was not attendance but the ratio of new to returning visitors, which held steady at fifty-fifty — meaning that half the people who came each year brought someone new with them. “It’s a fiercely strong community on its own,” she says. “People actually look forward to coming to this event.”

After five years at Baraza, Muchangi’s chapter there has come to a close. She will announce her next move in a few months. What she will say now is that it will take her skills from an East African stage to a pan-African one — deeper into audience strategy and what she calls evangelical community growth. Her central argument, the one she has been making in one form or another since she was planning birthday parties at fifteen, is simple: the product should always follow the audience, never the other way around. “Niche does not mean small,” she says, borrowing a line she heard at the festival that stuck with her. “It means specific.” That, in the end, is what all her experiments have been trying to prove.

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1. When two elephants fight

On May 1, Nigerians were treated to an unlikely sporting spectacle: a boxing match between content creator Oderhohwo Joseph Efe, popularly known as Carter Efe and musician Habeeb Badmus (stage name: Portable). After three rounds of comical chaos, Carter Efe emerged victorious with a 30–27 decision.

The bout was the centrepiece of a larger fight card featuring local and international fighters competing in the cruiserweight division. Organised by Balmoral Productions in partnership with Amir Khan Productions, the event carried many of the trappings of a professional boxing night: weigh-ins, promotional tours, celebrity appearances, and a paying audience eager for spectacle. Sports streaming platform DAZN streamed the match live, highlighting how combat sports are becoming part of the company’s broader push into Africa. In 2025, DAZN signed a global broadcasting agreement with traditional wrestling promoter African Warriors Fighting Championship to stream Dambe, a centuries-old combat sport popular across northern Nigeria, as part of efforts to deepen its footprint on the continent.

According to Ezekiel Adamu, chief executive of Balmoral Productions, the fight night cost roughly ₦1.3 billion ($935,000) to organise and generated nearly one billion views globally across streaming and social media platforms. Yet the significance of the event extended beyond the ring itself. Clips from the fight quickly spread across TikTok, Instagram, and X, dominating online conversations long after the fight ended. For many viewers, the appeal was not technical boxing ability but the collision of two internet personalities whose brands ride on controversy, humour, and spectacle.

The Carter Efe–Portable fight reflects a broader shift occurring across global sports and entertainment. Increasingly, creators, influencers, and internet-native celebrities are moving into sports not merely as commentators or sponsors, but as athletes. What began as novelty entertainment has evolved into a commercial strategy aimed at capturing one of the few things still scarce in the digital economy: live audience attention.

2. The fight that changed sports

The modern creator-athlete era arguably began in 2018 with a boxing match between British YouTuber Olajide Olatunji, better known as KSI, and his American counterpart, Logan Paul, in the UK. Initially dismissed as internet gimmickry, the match went on to become one of the most-watched boxing events that year, with 1.8 million viewers watching live and more than 38 million replay views across both creators’ YouTube channels. But beyond the numbers, the event revealed something more profound: creators could generate sports-level audiences without relying on traditional sporting institutions.

At the same time, traditional sports viewership among younger audiences had been steadily declining. Across major markets, younger fans were increasingly abandoning cable television and conventional sports broadcasting in favour of digital platforms built around creators, livestreams, and short-form content. Creator-led sports events succeeded because they adapted naturally to these changing consumption habits. Unlike traditional sports broadcasts, which often rely on institutional loyalty built over decades, creator sports are personality-driven, interactive, and internet-native. Audiences are not merely watching a match; they are following an ongoing storyline shaped by online rivalries, memes, fan communities, and parasocial relationships built over years of content creation.

Combat sports proved especially suited to the creator economy because they already relied heavily on spectacle, personal narrative, and rivalries. All these, coupled with an engaged fan base and the promise of live drama, were often enough to generate commercial interest. Also, with boxing and wrestling, creators could independently participate without the structure of a team. Following the success of KSI vs Logan Paul, other creators, including Jake Paul, Deji Olatunji and Tommy Fury, followed suit.

But the trend has not remained limited to individual combat sports. Team sports such as football and basketball have increasingly begun adapting to the creator-athlete era by building alternative leagues and entertainment formats designed specifically for digital-native audiences. One of the most prominent examples is the Kings League, launched in Spain in 2022 by former Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué alongside popular streamers, including Ibai Llanos. Combining seven-a-side football with livestreaming, fan voting, creator-owned teams, and unconventional rules, the league quickly attracted millions of online viewers and younger audiences largely disconnected from traditional football broadcasting. In late 2024, the league raised $63 million to expand into the UK and the US, bringing the total investment to $163 million.

A similar model emerged in Germany with the Baller League, founded in 2023 by entrepreneur Felix Starck and former footballers Mats Hummels and Lukas Podolski. The six-a-side indoor football competition blends professional players, retired athletes, and creators into short, high-intensity matches optimised for social media and livestream consumption. The Baller League has raised $25 million, with investors including Apex Capital, EQT Ventures, 885 Capital* and footballers Diogo Dalot and Mason Mount.

Upstart creator leagues are not the only ones embracing this shift. Traditional sports institutions have also begun adapting to the creator-athlete era to reach younger digital audiences. In 2021, the NBA launched the NBA Creator Cup, a basketball event featuring popular content creators and influencers competing during All-Star Weekend.

3. A league ahead of its time

Long before Nigerian creators began dabbling in primetime sports, a group of friends saw an opportunity to build a football league primarily on the back of social media relationships and interactions. That competition, now defunct, was called the Twitter Premier League (TPL).

Founded in 2014 by Efe Ori-Jesu, the TPL began as a challenge to Nigerian Twitter users who constantly debated football matches on Twitter, now known as X. Instead of arguing online, popular social media personalities were invited to prove themselves on the pitch. The league quickly gained momentum online, with matches drawing large crowds and regularly trending on Nigerian Twitter. Teams cultivated strong online identities, organised photo shoots, engaged fans on social media, and secured sponsorships from brands including Samsung and Smile Nigeria. Matches evolved into entertainment events featuring DJs, livestreams, and food vendors.

In many ways, the TPL anticipated the logic behind today’s creator-led sports leagues, building audience loyalty through community ownership and participation. Although the league generated significant buzz at its peak, the organisers struggled to sustain the operational demands to keep the project long-term. By the late 2010s, the TPL had ceased to exist, but it provided one of the earliest examples of an internet native sports community, foreshadowing many of the creator-led sports models now emerging globally.

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4. A new playbook for Nigerian sports

Once again, the creator-athlete trend is emerging in Nigeria and, in line with global patterns, is beginning with combat sports. The fight with Carter Efe was the third creator-boxing event involving Portable, who previously defeated Nollywood actor Charles Okocha and musician Speed Darlington in earlier bouts. But as seen internationally, creator involvement in sports is unlikely to remain confined to boxing and wrestling. Over time, the trend could expand into football, Nigeria’s most popular sport, potentially creating a new framework for engaging with local sports culture.

In Nigeria, football fandom and attention remain overwhelmingly oriented towards European leagues such as the English Premier League, La Liga, and the UEFA Champions League. While local clubs struggle to command sustained national interest, the Super Eagles, Nigeria’s national team, remain one of the few sporting institutions capable of generating nationwide emotional investment. This imbalance has long reflected broader issues around marketing, media visibility, and audience engagement within domestic sports.

In a version of the future, creator-led sporting events could offer an alternative pathway. Rather than attempting to replicate traditional league structures, creators could build internet-native sports ecosystems tailored to younger Nigerian audiences who already consume sports through social media, livestreams, and creator-driven content.

Should this shift happen, what will emerge is an internet-native ecosystem fundamentally different from the structures that currently define Nigerian sports. Rather than relying on traditional federations, television broadcasters, or legacy systems, creator-led sports will be built primarily for digital consumption: livestream-first competitions, short-form highlights engineered for TikTok and Instagram, interactive fan communities on WhatsApp and X, and personalities functioning as the central drivers of audience loyalty.

In practice, this will mean creator-owned football teams competing in short-format tournaments streamed on YouTube, celebrity five-a-side leagues sponsored by betting and fintech companies, or combat sports cards where the promotional narratives unfold online weeks before the event itself. The matches will then become one part of a broader entertainment cycle that includes podcasts, training content, livestreams, online feuds, fan voting, and creator collaborations. Attention, rather than athletic pedigree alone, will increasingly determine commercial value.

The model is already visible globally. The Kings League transformed football into an internet-native entertainment product by combining creators and unconventional rules with livestream distribution. Similar experiments are now emerging across basketball, motorsport, and combat sports, where digital engagement often matters as much as broadcast reach.

Over time, the distinction between creators and professional athletes will begin to erode. Traditional athletes are increasingly recognising that creator-led sports properties offer access to younger audiences. In December last year, Nigerian-British heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua knocked out Jake Paul in the second most-watched boxing match that year.

Nigeria’s sports economy will ultimately follow the same trajectory. What currently appears experimental or comedic will evolve into a parallel sports economy, one where creators function not just as entertainers, but as promoters, broadcasters, and sporting institutions in their own right.

*Disclosure: 885 Capital is a client of Communiqué Advisory, Communiqué’s strategy and consulting arm.

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Editor’s note: The article has been updated to accurately indicate Anthony Joshua’s opponent.

“When it came to me, I was like, I want to have my own Christian show.”

Flourish Ubanyi still remembers that classroom at Syracuse University. It was the first day of her master’s programme in broadcast and digital journalism. The professor had asked a simple question: why was everyone there? Some students wanted to become sports journalists. Others wanted careers in television or digital media. When it got to her turn, she said she wanted a Christian show.

At the time, she had no audience, no platform, and no real roadmap for how something like that would work, especially coming from Nigeria, where the biggest YouTube successes were mostly comedy skits and entertainment content. Today, that idea has become The Shining Light Show, a faith-based interview platform with more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers, millions of short-form views across social media, and a growing audience stretching from Nigeria to Ghana and the diaspora.

In one sense, her trajectory makes sense because Ubanyi’s life has never existed in separate, neat boxes of faith and work. Everything has stemmed from her faith. “My story is wrapped in faith. There’s no way I can tell you about my journey without mentioning God, or God told me this and all of that — that’s just my story.” In another sense, it makes you wonder how someone with no particular love for media, no childhood dream of being on camera, ended up where she is.

Ubanyi grew up in a religious household, but the faith that would come to organise her life was forged away from home. At ten years old, she was sent to boarding school for her secondary education. Being alone at that age, far from family, did something to her. It forced a reckoning. “I found myself praying every night before I slept, just for my family, praying that God should protect them,” she recalls. “I believe that was when I started to encounter God.”

However, what began as the prayers of a homesick child deepened into something more. When a classmate scored the highest in one of her school’s fiercely competitive assessment cycles, Ubanyi walked up to her to ask her secret. “She told me that it is God, because she used to pray a lot.” That response was convincing.

Ubanyi went to her empty classroom at 5:30 the next morning and got on her knees, too, and even more regularly. By the end of the year, she scored much higher than she did in previous years. But the more significant shift was internal. “Once I showed interest in God and really started genuinely seeking Him, I now started to desire Him very much, more than just academics.”

When it was time to choose what to study at university, she picked Mass Communication. “In my heart, I just had a green light that it was meant to be my course.” The irony is that she had no particular ambition towards that line of work. What she really wanted was to go into ministry. “Even when I was in university, I did not want to do anything in the media. I used to see them carrying laptops and editing videos. I just wanted to be a pastor. Going into ministry, I just like to follow God, do what He will have me do. That was my path, really.”

Her master’s programme in broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University changed her relationship with the media. Unlike the more theoretical approach she had experienced before, the programme was deeply practical. Students learned video production, editing, storytelling, website creation, and emerging media technologies. It was also where she first encountered virtual reality filmmaking.

At the time, VR felt like the future. Media companies and universities were heavily investing in immersive storytelling technology. Ubanyi became fascinated by the possibilities. She experimented with VR cameras, 360-degree filmmaking, and immersive visual experiences. “I felt like that was going to be the next big thing.”

After graduating, she returned to Nigeria, hoping to work in television. She applied to stations like TVC and Channels Television but didn’t get hired. Then a former professor sent her a message about CNN opening a bureau in Lagos.

Ubanyi reached out to Stephanie Busari, who was the CNN bureau head at the time, and secured an internship. At CNN, she worked across digital reporting, video production, social media, and event coverage. But even then, her mind was elsewhere. “I wanted to actually leave and do virtual reality,” she says.

After leaving CNN, she began freelancing and fully leaned into VR storytelling. Her father bought her a 360-degree camera, and she started producing immersive documentaries for YouTube.

She also contributed to the New York Times’ NYT360 project, a year-long initiative commissioning daily 360-degree videos from countries around the world. “They were taking videos from different countries, and I did not see any content from Nigeria.” She had cold-emailed the project’s editor to point out that Nigeria was conspicuously absent. Her observation was acknowledged, and she became their point of contact for content. She also worked on multimedia reporting projects around maternal health and trained journalists transitioning into video storytelling.

Then came Deutsche Welle (DW). One of the projects she worked on at that time was a German media exchange programme that brought 10 media entrepreneurs from Germany and 10 from Nigeria to Lagos for training. One of the people running the training was from the DW Academy. A month later, they reached out to say they were expanding in Nigeria and were looking for journalists. Ubanyi became one of the pioneer team members.

But through all of this, the idea of building her own Christian platform never fully disappeared.

The idea for the show had been circling for years. She had first felt it while watching a Christian programme called Turning Point on television during the period she was preparing her master’s application. There was something about the intimacy of the programme — the testimonies, the sense that faith ran underneath ordinary lives — that stayed with her, without her quite knowing why.

Over the years, the idea kept returning in different forms. At one point, she imagined an online radio station. At another time, she thought about building a network in which multiple hosts could run different faith-centred shows. Each time, it came close and receded. “The idea had been on my heart for at least seven years before I eventually took action.”

The first episode of The Shining Light Show went live on YouTube in November 2022, while she was still at DW. Ubanyi knew she was essentially beginning from zero, with no name recognition. “So I asked myself, what will my leverage be? What do I have that other people don’t have?” The answer was production quality.

She filmed the show herself, using 4K cameras, with a three-angle setup and deliberate lighting. The production quality was unusual by Nigerian podcast standards at the time.

Her approach to hosting, she admits, is counterintuitive. “I realised that it’s not about me. People don’t want to know about me. As long as you’re giving them value — so much value that you cannot be ignored — that’s when they will start thinking, who is this person? But initially, I knew that, nah, it’s not about me. It’s about what they want to get from me.”

The same ethos also shaped how she thought about short-form content. Where many shows treat Instagram clips as trailers designed to funnel viewers to the full video, Ubanyi decided each clip had to be complete in itself: a beginning, a middle, an end — a full arc in sixty seconds. “My goal is that people leave any interaction with Shining Light with impact. There’s no way you watch anything from Shining Light and not get something. Even if it’s thirty seconds.”

The growth came faster than she had expected. In March 2023, a full-length interview crossed 10,000 views. The channel hit 10,000 subscribers not long after. Then, in January 2026, the YouTube plaque arrived: 100,000 subscribers in just over two years from a standing start. TikTok, which she had only opened to claim the handle before anyone else could, reached 100,000 followers without a single piece of content created specifically for the platform.

Meanwhile, the show has never run on a consistent schedule. There have been gaps of two and three months between episodes, driven by the realities of a full-time job at the time and, even now, personal and family responsibilities.

“People know that no matter how long it takes, they are going to get value,” she says. “That is why Shining Light will not post for two or three months, and then we come out, and the video still goes viral.”

After leaving DW, Ubanyi formalised the passion project into Shining Light Studios, a company built to house not just the show but an eventual network of values-driven content.

“The dream is to have other kinds of content, not just The Shining Light Show,” she says. “A network. A lot of people are actually looking for wholesome, pure content that they can actually watch, that they can actually consume.”

The more immediate work is less glamorous: building systems, stabilising production rhythms, and getting to a point where the show can run without the host carrying every element on their own.

Ubanyi has found a way to combine her training, her desire, and her passion into one thing. And maybe, in the end, that’s what really matters.

But despite everything she is building, her ambitions remain surprisingly simple. “I’m an indoor person. I just want to take care of my family, be a good mother, be a good wife, love God, and do meaningful work.”

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Join the Inner Circle

I started Communiqué in May 2020 based on the simple bet that Africa’s media and creative economy deserved coverage that took them seriously. Not as subjects of feel-good stories or “Africa rising” shenanigans, but as industries with real economic and sociopolitical importance. Industries with power dynamics, structural conundrums, and operators building things worth writing about.

That bet has remained relevant for six years and has reached tens of thousands of readers across 100+ countries. But what has also remained is the harsh reality of figuring out ways to fund the work without compromising it.

First a labour of love, then the paywall

At first, all of this was a “labour of love” — an essay a month, based on topics I found worth pursuing. No commercial expectations.

Then it became something more serious — an opportunity to build a new media platform that chronicles the ideas, stories, and strategies shaping an industry. To monetise it, I began accepting ads and sponsorships. A few came in, but not frequently. I had a day job, so I wasn’t really bothered.

Then, in October 2024, I went all in after leaving my full-time job. At that point, I put up a paywall. It was an experiment, and I was open about my scepticism. I’ve long argued that subscription models in African markets compete with basic necessities, and that the pool of readers with disposable income for media is limited. But I needed to figure out a way to fund the growing editorial operation. It was no longer just me.

The walls come down

A year later, we took down the paywall, and I explained why. The short version was that while the paywall brought in a small, loyal core that paid for our editorial work, it narrowed our reach. And we cannot fulfil Communiqué’s mission to connect and amplify Africa’s media and creative economy if our stories live behind walls. It also ran counter to the communal ethos we’d developed with our audience.

So in September 2025, the newsletter became completely free to read again.

In that same essay, however, I described what would replace the paywall: a membership model. One that focused more on community movements and less on economic transactions. We’ve been able to build this connection via our in-real-life events. We are now folding that back into the newsletter through the Communiqué Inner Circle.

What is the Inner Circle?

The Inner Circle is the group of readers who fund Communiqué’s editorial work directly. There are already a handful of them, but we are now formalising the experience.

This is not a paywall going by another name. There’s no gated content or secret Discord group. It’s something simpler and, I think, more honest: an invitation to fund the insights and analysis you love, so we can keep it free for the next reader who finds us.

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry — if our essays have informed a business pitch or decision, if our reports have impacted your work or career, or if a sentence has stuck with you long after you close the page — the Inner Circle is how you return the favour.

What your Inner Circle contributions fund

I want to be specific because vague requests deserve vague responses. The Communiqué Inner Circle contributions fund original reporting and research across the continent — exploratory trips, interviews, document requests and library visits, and long phone calls that turn into a single paragraph. We want to be truly pan-African. They fund the data we license, so you don’t have to chase it down yourself. They fund the expensive subscriptions we have to absorb so that our stories remain ever fresh and relevant to you.

They also fund the things you can’t see on the page: the freedom to kill a story that doesn’t hold up, to pursue one that doesn’t have an immediately obvious audience or angle, to say no to coverage that could compromise our integrity.

How it works

You can contribute monthly or annually, at whatever level makes sense for you:

• $5/month, $15/quarter, or $55/year is the standard contribution

• $10/month, $30/quarter, or $100/year is for readers who want to do more

• Custom options are available for readers, teams, or institutions who want to fund a specific area of coverage

We will acknowledge every Inner Circle member (unless you’d rather stay anonymous, which is fine). You’ll receive an annual letter from me each December reflecting on what your support funded during the year. And occasionally, you’ll get a note from our editorial team — what we’re tracking, what almost made it in, and what we’ve learned from reader replies. You’ll get priority access to the things that make Communiqué tick behind the scenes, and you’ll be the first to know about our events and special reports.

How did we get here?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been going through our subscriber intelligence programme, a structured series of conversations with a cross-section of our readers. Some version of this question came up on several calls: “How do you actually make money?”

It’s a fair question, and it deserves a direct answer.

The largest part of our revenue comes from advisory services — working directly with companies, institutions, and organisations that want Communiqué’s expertise applied to their specific challenges. Media strategy, market positioning, editorial direction, and audience intelligence. These are engagements where we bring our industry expertise to bear on a client’s actual problem, and we get paid for it.

The second stream is research and market insights. The work we do to understand Africa’s creative economy — the mapping, the data synthesis, the pattern recognition — has commercial value beyond our editorial pages and industry. Organisations making investment or operational decisions across sectors need that kind of analysis, and we produce it.

The third is event sponsorships. Communiqué IRL, our city-to-city networking series, creates a room that the right people in this industry want to be in. Sponsors pay to be present in that room. It’s a straightforward value exchange, and when we get the curation right, it works for everyone.

Taken together, these three streams fund a meaningful share of what we do. But they all have their shortcomings. Advisory work is episodic. Research commissions are not rhythmically predictable. Events require significant capital to produce and carry real execution risk.

Reader funding is different. It is recurring and diversified across many individual contributors. It doesn’t end when a project does. And crucially, it changes our accountability structure: every other revenue stream imposes an obligation on someone outside our editorial conversation. The Inner Circle creates an obligation primarily to you.

Why this, and why now

When we removed the paywall in September, we made four commitments about what would come next: positioning Communiqué to reach millions of Africans at home and in the diaspora, expanding our events portfolio, rolling out intelligence products for the people making decisions in this industry, and introducing a membership model to anchor a sustainable, community-driven future.

The Inner Circle is the fourth of those promises kept.

Our commercial revenue streams — however well they perform — don’t give Communiqué the kind of foundation that lets us plan in years rather than quarters. Reader funding does. It aligns our incentives with yours: we get better when you find us more useful, not when an advertiser finds us safer. It lets us say no to the wrong opportunities and yes to the ambitious ones (and boy, do we have a lot of them). It makes the work answerable to you, the readers, which is the only audience that should ever shape what we publish.

If you’ve been reading for a while and have been waiting for a way to show us how much we matter to you, this is your chance. Don’t pass it up.

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“I’m obsessed with affordability, access, and seamlessness. I don’t think that things should be priced out of people’s reach. This is the foundation for Piggyvest, and it is the same for everything I do.”

Most people know the name Odun Eweniyi through Piggyvest, the savings and investment platform she co-founded in 2016, which now has over 6.7 million active users and, by most accounts, is the app that taught a generation of young Nigerians how to preserve their money. That story has been told many times.

What hasn’t been explored, at least not fully, is Eweniyi’s role as an investor in Nigeria’s creative industries. She is the co-founder of Lagos-based electronic music collective Group Therapy, an executive producer on Editi Effiong’s Netflix film The Black Book, and a backer of Carousel Network, the producers of I Said What I Said (ISWIS) podcast.

The philosophy driving those investments is the same one that built Piggyvest. And if you trace it back, the seeds of that philosophy were planted very early.

Eweniyi grew up an erudite. Her father was a university professor whose interests ran to philosophy and psychology. Her mother, also a professor, lectured in early childhood education and sociology. Between them, they built a home where asking questions wasn’t just tolerated, it was expected. “Expressing yourself was highly encouraged,” she says. “Things were not treated as ‘you must do this.’ I could ask why.”

Her father had a rule about his bookshelf: if you picked up a book, you had to finish it. It worked, perhaps too well. “I’d just pick up books because I felt like reading them, and then I’d finish them,” she recalls. So she read Wole Soyinka. She read Shakespeare. She read non-fiction. When she didn’t understand something, her father would sit with her and explain it.

She and all her siblings were exposed to literature and the arts from an early age. They all turned out creative, artsy, and deeply self-assured. Her younger sister draws. Eweniyi writes — and has written, in one form or another, since she was in primary school, making up stories through secondary school and keeping multiple university blogs, without, it seems, ever thinking of them as anything unusual. “Writing for me felt as natural as breathing,” she says. “There’s no introduction to it. I don’t have a particular point at which I decided to write creatively. It just has always been.”

Eweniyi graduated from Covenant University in 2013 with a degree in Computer Engineering. She came to Lagos for her mandatory National Youth Service Corps year with a clear plan: finish her service, go abroad, pursue a master’s in Computer Science, specifically in Cryptography, and then return to academia as a professor, just like her parents. But during that year, she made a choice that changed everything.

Her friends from school, Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze, were already deep in the startup world, building PushCV, and she had joined them as a social media manager. On the side, she had also begun to write professionally. Her sister had introduced her to Bankole Oluwafemi, founder of TechCabal. Eweniyi wrote to him and was told to write a sample story. Her story was a piece about Gossy Ukanwoke and his then-EdTech venture, Beni American University. Bankole thought it had legs, and she got the job as a junior writer.

When PushCV got into an accelerator programme, she paused her work at TechCabal to focus on the startup. A few months later, tech and media entrepreneur Adewale Yusuf called to say that he was launching TechPoint and wanted her to work with him. She joined for about seven months, writing alongside Muyiwa Matuloko and Daniel Orubo, her longtime friend and now the Editor-in-Chief at Zikoko.

Meanwhile, in December 2015, she and her co-founders decided their next product would be a platform to help young Nigerians save money. They built the app and launched it in April 2016 under the name Piggybank. It would later be rebranded as Piggyvest.

At Piggyvest, Eweniyi found ways to flex her creative muscles. When the platform launched, the division of labour was straightforward: Ifezue wrote the code, Chibueze handled customers, and Eweniyi ran operations. But she also managed the company’s social media. “If you scroll down Piggyvest’s social media, all those posts were by me. The earlier tweets, all the earlier memes on our Instagram page, all of those were by me.”

Her social media work was a critical business function. The company had no funding at the time, so they had to find imaginative ways to attract attention and ask young Nigerians to trust them with their money. Her approach was deceptively simple: don’t talk at people, talk to them. Be, as she explained it, their “best friend that knows a lot about money.” That balance, approachable but authoritative, funny but financially serious, remains one of Piggyvest’s most distinctive features. She knew, even in those early years, that she wanted to eventually build a content team that could scale the voice she had created. For several years, the idea sat in her head while the company lacked the resources. “A big one, for instance, is our savings report. Before we put out the first savings report in 2023, I’d been talking about exploring savings data for maybe four years before that. We just didn’t have the resources.” When the time finally came, she knew exactly who to call: Daniel Orubo, her writing partner from TechPoint and Zikoko, came on board to help establish the team.

If one side of Eweniyi’s work is helping Nigerians save, the other is helping them spend well — on things that improve their lives and expand what they think is possible for them, especially their creative pursuits. “Creative endeavours should be innately democratic or democratised. If you want to do something and you can summon the willpower to try, it shouldn’t be out of your reach. You should be able to make a movie and show it to people who should see it.”

When Editi Effiong came to her about The Black Book, she didn’t need much convincing. Their relationship stretched back nearly a decade, to the early Piggyvest years when Effiong’s production company, Anakle, was a constant presence at the edges of the Lagos tech scene. “We’ve had a great relationship going on ten years,” she says. “So when he said he wanted to do an audacious movie, and the premise is one that’s very dear to my heart, given the role that we played in the EndSARS protests — I thought, why not? Sounds big, sounds huge, sounds like something that pushes the boundaries of what we know as Nigerian media or Nigerian movies.” Netflix picked it up, and it became the most-watched Nigerian film on the platform.

The same instinct drove her to co-found Group Therapy. “I actually enjoy having a social life. I post all on my Instagram about all of my experiences with my friends. I want to enjoy every bit of it, and I don’t want to have to break the bank to do it.” But the Lagos entertainment landscape she came up in had a clear message for people like her: if you can’t buy a table, you can’t come in. “That is insane,” she says. Group Therapy, co-founded with electronic music DJ/producer Aniko, is her answer to that problem — pop-up rave parties built for people who wanted a good time without paying a king’s ransom. Carousel Network, the media network and podcast studio behind I Said What I Said, follows the same logic. Quality creative work, made accessible, distributed widely.

There could have been a life in which Eweniyi became a computer science professor, but she chose something different instead. Now, a decade later, the question isn’t whether she made the right call; it’s where all of it is going. Is there a future where she leaves Piggyvest to focus on her creative industry pursuits full-time? She pushes back on the premise. “Why do I have to leave Piggyvest to do something in the media and creative industries? I don’t believe those things are separate,” she says. To her, the data she sees every day at Piggyvest — what people save for, what they quietly want beyond rent and school fees — is the same raw material that informs every creative bet she makes. The fintech, the film investment, and the rave parties are not parallel lives. They are the same conviction, expressed in different ways.

She can’t yet say exactly where it leads. “All of this work is heading towards something. I won’t lie to you — I don’t know what. But I know I have to keep doing it.”

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Editor’s Note: The essay has been updated to accurately reflect Piggyvest’s active user count, Aniko’s correct qualification, and Eweniyi’s mother’s profession.

1. In Dreamland

On April 28, 2024, Nigerian YouTube creator and filmmaker Eniola Olanrewaju — popularly known as Korty EO — staged an event called “Dreamland” in Lagos. It was her first live show, and the premise was straightforward: take the formats her audience already loved on YouTube and bring them to life in a physical location.

Over the course of the evening, attendees watched a live rendition of Flow with Korty featuring comedian Isaac Olayiwola (Layi Wasabi) as a guest, followed by a Love or Lies segment that kept the energy up. There was a spoken-word performance by a poet, a sneak peek at a never-released interview with Afrobeats star Davido, a raffle with lucky attendees taking home $500, and an after-party with sets from a roster of musicians. By most accounts, people had a good time.

Dreamland was not the first time a Nigerian creator had tried to extend an online format into a live experience. But it was a useful demonstration of something that does not happen often enough in this ecosystem: the deliberate recognition that a format built for one medium can retain its value in another, that the audience relationship that sustains a YouTube channel is transferable, and that transferability has a price people will pay.

Olanrewaju hasn’t reenacted Dreamland, but she has since moved in another structurally interesting direction. She founded Any Production, a film & TV network, which suggests she is beginning to think less like a creator and more like a company—that shift, whether by instinct or design, is the subject of this essay.

2. A familiar problem, a familiar argument

Four years ago, in Communiqué 33, I made the case that more journalists needed to apply product thinking to their work. The argument was this: too many media companies had confused content as their only product, and that confusion had cost them dearly — because it meant editorial decisions were disconnected from the economic logic of the businesses they were trying to build. The forward-thinking ones — Stears (still a media company at the time), The New York Times, Daily Maverick — had figured out that product thinking begins with understanding the user’s problem and designing around it, not publishing stories and hoping for the best.

We can make the same argument for the African creator economy, and perhaps even more urgently. At the heart of any business is a value exchange. You offer something; someone pays for it; you keep the margin. For creators, this exchange has always been structurally awkward. The audience’s side is legible enough: they receive entertainment, information, and a sense of community. But how do creators extract economic value in return?

There are broadly two answers. The first involves a third party as the paying customer: brand partnerships, sponsorships, and platform revenue-sharing. The second involves the audience directly: merchandise, ticketed events, licensed IP, and direct-to-consumer products. Most African creators live almost entirely in the first category, a structural dependency that the Africa Creator Economy Report 2.0 documents in detail. The problem with relying on the first category alone is not just that it limits revenue; it also relinquishes economic control over creative work to someone else’s decisions. A brand’s budget gets cut, a platform changes its algorithm, and the income disappears.

Product thinking is, at its core, the practice of designing one’s way out of that dependency.

3. Content is just the beginning

Product thinking begins with a question most creators never ask seriously: who, exactly, is my audience, and what problem am I solving for them?

They skip the question because their content still gets views without it. But skipping it forecloses the entire conversation about what else the audience relationship could be worth.

Olanrewaju’s audience, for instance, is not simply “people who like interviews.” It is, more precisely, young Nigerians who want honest, unguarded conversations about identity, relationships, and modern life, delivered in a format that feels less like a produced show and more like eavesdropping on people they wish they knew. That level of specificity matters. It is the difference between knowing which extensions of the format will work and which will not. Dreamland worked because the intimacy of the online format translates to a physical conversation. A documentary commission, as Olanrewaju proved with Victoria’s Secret, works for the same reason. A fashion line probably does not, at least not without a different kind of rigour to prove otherwise.

This is what it means to treat content as a foundation rather than an endpoint. A video with 300,000 views is evidence of a real relationship between a creator and an audience. But the video is one expression of that relationship. Product thinking forces the question: what are the others?

The clearest (and most famous) illustration of how seriously we can answer that question is Disney. What began as cartoon characters became films, then franchises, then theme parks, merch lines, Broadway productions, and a media empire. Walt Disney was not in the cartoon business. He was in the business of building emotional attachment at scale, and he spent his life finding every form that attachment could take. The content was never the end product. It was the soil for planting seeds.

A film producer who thinks only about cinema revenue is possibly leaving much of their harvest to rot in the field. If 50,000 people can move to watch a movie, there is a high chance that 2,000 of them will buy merchandise. Immersia by Anthill Studios is making a case for this.

In the same way, a creator who has built 300,000 loyal subscribers has done the hardest part of any business: establishing trust at scale. The question is what to build on top of it.

4. What do products actually look like?

I know that arguing for creators to think in terms of products is easy. The harder question is: what products, exactly?

The answer depends on the creator, the audience, and the resources available. But the landscape is clearer than most people realise, and it is worth mapping carefully. There are broadly three categories, defined not by product type but by what it takes to build one.

I. Products a creator can build alone: Not all creators need teams or partners. Sometimes they have enough going on to build alone, which often requires the least capital and infrastructure.

Paid content subscriptions are the most obvious — a Substack, a Patreon, or a private community where subscribers pay for access to more of what they already follow for free. The model works when the creator has earned enough trust that a segment of their audience wants more. When done well, this strategy converts passive attention into recurring revenue with no middleman. But it also requires the audience to have significant purchasing power.

Digital products follow a similar logic. A creator known for a particular expertise — cooking, photography, finance, fitness, fashion — can productise that knowledge as templates, presets, guides, courses, or e-books. The content is already proof that the audience trusts the creator’s judgment. The product crystallises that trust into something they can own and use. Here, product functionality and the strength of emotional attachment to the creator matter most.

Merchandise is a different kind of signal: it tests whether people identify with a creator strongly enough to carry a piece of their brand into the world. The smarter approach for creators without capital to stockpile inventory is to print on demand, which eliminates risk while still testing whether the demand exists.

II. Products built in partnership with brands, agencies, or investors: Some creators grow to a certain scale where they become attractive commercial partners. Then the question shifts from how to monetise directly to how to structure that monetisation so it reflects rather than erodes the trust that made them attractive in the first place.

Co-created product lines are one version of this. The creator brings the audience and the credibility; the brand or partner brings the supply chain and distribution. When the partnership is genuine, the product can work for both sides. The risk is alignment: a creator whose audience trusts their aesthetic judgment needs a co-branded product that reflects that trust, not just a product that carries a name.

Exclusive content and format licensing deals are another path. A creator who has developed a recognisable format — a documentary style, an interview approach, a show concept — can license that format to a platform, a brand, or a production company. Olanrewaju’s Victoria’s Secret documentary is an example of a brand paying for access to a specific creative sensibility, not just a distribution channel. That is a different and more durable commercial relationship than a standard sponsorship.

There is also a more structural opportunity here — one that local and international operators have not yet seriously explored in Africa. Globally, companies like Jellysmack and Spotter have built significant businesses by acquiring or licensing rights to creators’ content and running the monetisation on their behalf. Jellysmack, backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund and valued at over $3 billion at its peak, works with creators like MrBeast and The Try Guys by re-optimising their existing content for distribution across multiple platforms and managing brand deals and revenue strategy. Spotter takes a different approach: it buys the rights to creators’ back catalogues for a set period, pays creators upfront — in some cases up to $100 million — and then runs the content promotion strategy, taking the AdSense revenue in exchange. The company has paid out over $600 million to creators. Electrify Video Partners, a UK-based private equity-backed fund, has gone further still, raising $85 million specifically to acquire YouTube channels outright, particularly those with long-form educational content.

The pattern across all three is the same: identifying creators with proven audiences and strong content IP, and building the commercial architecture around them — often bearing the operational and financial risk that the creator alone could not absorb. None of this exists in any meaningful form in Africa. For a local operator, agency, or investor with the right analytical framework, the opportunity to do for African creators what these companies have done in their markets is significant and largely unclaimed. The model does not even require working with a single creator at a time. A portfolio approach, which involves identifying five to ten creators across different niches with strong audience relationships and buildable IP, spreads the risk considerably while compounding the upside.

III. Products built with a team: The most valuable creator businesses are not built solo. They require operators — people who can manage logistics, build infrastructure, and turn a creative asset into something commercially durable.

Ticketed live experiences are the clearest example. Korty’s Dreamland worked because she had people to manage the venue, production, ticketing, talent, and experience design. The creator is the draw; the team makes it possible. Done consistently, with the intention of building a recurring event rather than a one-off, live shows create a revenue stream that no algorithm can interrupt.

Crea8torium, which is positioning itself as a school for African creators, is another example. While the show, hosted by Salem King and Adaora Mbelu, is the most visible part of the vehicle, there’s a team of operators, including two other co-founders, Mofe Ade and Karishma Daryani-Chugani, in the backend building the engine and designing other products, including a paid membership offering.

And this brings us to our final point.

Communiqué is a trade publication for leaders and professionals in the African media and creative economy. We are also a research and intelligence partner for large institutions and individual operators who want to tell better stories, reach the right rooms, and earn the coverage that matters.

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5. The operator gap

There are creators in Africa who have already arrived at some version of this — by design or accident.

Fisayo Fosudo started in 2016 as a solo operator, filming tech reviews on basic equipment in Lagos. What he runs today looks nothing like that. With over 780,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 145 million lifetime video views, Fosudo now operates across multiple content verticals simultaneously — tech reviews, the Finance Friday series, in-depth economic explainers, interviews with figures ranging from former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Don Jazzy and the Deputy Governor of the CBN — all while running, by his own account, eight parallel projects at once. He has a full team, a suite of professional equipment (including a robotic camera arm used in production), and brand partnerships with Samsung, Google, LG, and major Nigerian fintech companies. He built all of this from Lagos, without being on a global platform’s payroll, and without compromising the specificity of what his audience came for: clear, rigorous, Africa-first analysis of technology and money.

Fosudo treats his audience as a viable commercial asset capable of taking many forms. His income does not depend on any single platform or sponsor. He is closer to a media company with a face than he is to a content creator with a channel.

There is also the I Said What I Said podcast team and what they’ve done with their live events and Owambe parties. There is creator Tomike Adeoye’s Party with Olori-Ebi event, which began as a smaller idea in 2023 and has now evolved into something bigger. What unites them is the move from content to cultural product — something people do not just consume passively but show up for, pay for, and return to.

But one implication of this argument is that the creator economy cannot grow on creators alone.

Oritsejolomi Otomewo made this point in Communiqué 103, writing that the creator economy would not reach the scale any of us want for it without the formation of a creator middle class, one where value is stored in companies, formats, and intellectual property, not only in personalities and follower counts. He also argued that a functioning middle class would pull a second economy into existence around it: editors, writers, producers, designers, and strategists, working not as side hustlers orbiting fame but as professionals inside creator-led companies.

The other half of that picture is the operator, and it is the part most conspicuously missing in Africa’s creator economy.

Not every creator can do all of this, nor should they have to. The most durable creator businesses internationally are partnerships between creative talent and operational infrastructure. Fosudo’s output today — the volume, the polish, the diversification across verticals — is not possible without a team. The trust he built is one thing; the architecture that monetises it is another, and the two require different skills.

The more ambitious version of this model is Steven Bartlett’s steven.com, which closed an eight-figure investment round in October 2025 at a $425 million valuation, with the stated ambition of building “the Disney of the creator economy.” The premise is clear: the creator is the IP, and the company is the institutionalised product-thinking entity.

In Africa, this is a real and largely unclaimed opportunity. An entrepreneur who can look at a creator with 300,000 loyal followers and ask the right questions about who that audience is, what they value, and what forms that value could take is not just helping a creator. That entrepreneur is identifying a business that the creator alone may not have the bandwidth or the operational skill to build.

The operator layer of the creator economy is as legitimate and potentially as lucrative as the creative layer itself. It does not require being on camera. It requires a willingness to apply rigorous thinking to assets that most people still regard as content.

The point is not that every creator should become a product manager, or that they should squeeze every piece of content for commercial yield. Over-commercialisation is its own trap, and audiences sense it faster than we think. The argument is more precise than that: creators who take seriously the question of what value they are generating — and who are honest about the many forms that value could take — are more likely to build businesses that last. Africa’s creator economy has generated more than enough attention. What it needs now is the thinking to match.

“If I’ve got a gift, it’s for picking the interesting project, and if the project is interesting, that does half the work for you.”

For Kevin Kriedemann, this is less a philosophy than a description of how his career has unfolded over three decades championing South Africa’s film industry. It was his desire, or “luck” as he calls it, to pursue things that interest him, even though some of them were by necessity, that placed him in positions where he could establish himself as a publicist par excellence.

The environment he grew up in made that almost inevitable.

“I grew up in a very strange family by South African standards,” Kriedemann recalls of his childhood in the suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. His father was a fine artist who made a living via landscape painting, and his mother was a real estate agent. The conversations around their house were always about his dad’s art.

But it was not just art that shaped him. His upbringing was layered with different belief systems and ideas. His parents belonged to a spiritual offshoot of Islam called Subud, a movement with Middle Eastern roots that had given them new names. He attended a Jewish pre-primary school. Sometimes he went to church on Sundays. At home, there were influences ranging from martial arts and Tai Chi to neuro-linguistic programming and past-life regression. “I wasn’t one thing,” he recalls. “It was a whole bunch of things that weren’t on any list.”

That openness shaped how he thought about the world. It also shaped how he thought about stories, who told them, how they are told, and where their power came from. At the same time, he was growing up in a country in transition. Apartheid ended while he was still young, and South Africa was reinventing itself. There was a strong sense, at least for a time, that anything was possible. “I kind of thought I was going to be a writer,” he says. “I was going to write the great South African novel.”

For Kriedeman, writing came early. He wrote his first screenplay before finishing high school. Around the same time, he was playing water polo competitively and working as a waiter to support himself. He was, by his own admission, doing “everything but studying.” The screenplay was optioned three times but never produced. He completed a novel, then a non-fiction book. Then he started a third book, which never saw the light of day. His laptop was stolen, and he had no backup. He tried to rewrite it, but something had changed. “It stops being as fun when you’re trying to remember what you wrote rather than just being in the moment,” he says.

Around the same time, life became more demanding. At 18, he had become independent, studying by correspondence because he could not afford university, and working to pay his bills. Writing required time and space—he had neither. So, slowly, he moved away from it. Because he had bills to pay, his focus shifted toward whatever would earn him money. That shift is what eventually drew him into the film industry.

His first professional job was writing for a youth magazine. There, he began covering pop culture, attending film screenings, and writing reviews. Before long, he landed a role at The CallSheet, a major trade publication covering South Africa’s film industry, and worked his way up to the role of an editor.

Kriedeman’s experience at The CallSheet was a comprehensive education in the industry he would spend his entire working life in. Thanks to the publication’s pioneering work, he gained firsthand access to the inner workings of the local film industry and the people who made it function. He was also actively involved in work that helped build the industry’s structure. His team published the first-ever benchmark figures for what South African screenwriters were actually being paid. They mapped how many cinemas existed in the country, and what local films had realistically earned. “It was just all statistics that people hadn’t really seen before.” After The CallSheet, he worked at a couple of similar trade publications like the Filmmaker’s Guide to South Africa, The Event, Creative Showcase, and The Markex Buyers Guide. He also took on Africa-focused roles for international publications, including Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

After seven years doing this work, Kriedemann realised he had reached the limit of what he could achieve in journalism. It was the early 2000s; media publications were uncertain about what to make of the internet transformation underway, and the print industry was simultaneously losing its core business model. “I was doing less and less of the actual root of things, but I wanted to get back to doing that, and I wanted to try something else. So at that stage, I shifted into PR.”

Working in the industry for that long meant he had interacted with many publicists and had seen how similar their work was to his. One of the publicists he connected with was Joy Sapieka, who had sold her UK company to what would become Premier PR and had worked with distinguished film directors and actors, including Sam Mendes and Nicole Kidman. At the time, she had returned to live in Cape Town and work in the local industry. The two clicked immediately and began collaborating; one of their first projects was for the Encounters documentary festival.

Not long into their collaboration, Jon Blair, a South African Oscar winner who had taken over Al Jazeera’s documentary productions, called Sapieka to look for a PR team. Sapieka and Kriedemann ran communications for Al Jazeera across Africa for roughly seven years. The experience opened Kriedeman’s world beyond South Africa’s borders in ways his upbringing and experiences never had. “Al Jazeera was also a defining moment. Just that sense of really working across the continent for the first time, seeing how differently the media are structured in different places, understanding how South Africa is perceived in various parts of the continent for very understandable reasons and not very flattering ways.”

They stayed until Qatar’s diplomatic blockade made it impossible to renew their contract with the media company. But by then, another opportunity had already arrived. A former Callsheet colleague, now at Triggerfish Animation, brought Kriedemann in alongside Sapieka to help conceptualise a local storytelling development lab. The team expanded the project’s scope and made it pan-African. They received 1,400 entries, out of which major Triggerfish productions were developed, including Mama K’s Team 4 (sold to Netflix, later retitled Supa Team 4), and Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes (Disney).

The lab proved something important, but it also exposed a gap. “The stories came from here, but we weren’t quite at the stage where we could convince international studios to go all in and also let Africans direct African stories.” That gap was the seed of what became Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, an animated anthology series. The question Kriedemann kept returning to was: how do you qualify African directors to tell big-budget stories for global streamers? The answer, as he saw it after watching Love, Death & Robots, was the anthology format, a structure in which no single film bore all the risk and a body of work could speak louder than any individual pitch.

The timing was fortunate. Disney was launching in Africa, fresh off the success of Black Panther, and looking for a flagship African project. Triggerfish had 20 years of industry relationships and 1,400 story lab entries to draw from. They were able to bring Peter Ramsey, fresh from directing Into the Spider-Verse, on board as executive producer. In the end, ten projects from seven countries were selected and developed to form the anthology. Kizazi Moto won international awards and generated real excitement.

However, it also came with its disappointment. By launch, Disney+ was available in Africa only in South Africa and Egypt, which meant most of the filmmakers couldn’t watch the films they had made. “That just felt like such a missed opportunity,” Kriedemann says. “We had this beautiful product that wasn’t available for most Africans.”

Meanwhile, in parallel with the Triggerfish work, Kriedemann was developing a growing relationship with the now-defunct indigenous streamer Showmax. Kriedemann came on board for its very first original production and later became a part of their team.

The scale of the work and the resources he had at his disposal were also quite different from what he was used to. “I walked into my first Showmax meeting, and there were 50 people around a table at a five-star hotel, each of them a marketing specialist in a different avenue, a very different scale to a lot of the stuff I’d done until then.”

From there, he effectively built Showmax’s content PR function from scratch and helped steer the streamer’s relaunch with Comcast.

Kizazi Moto and Showmax were both in full swing at the same time. “It really felt like I had two full-time jobs.” So when Kizazi Moto went into production and had to choose between becoming a hands-on producer and staying at Showmax as a publicist, he chose to stay. “It was really tough. I would have loved to be in one of those worlds where I could do both.”

When Showmax’s future began to look uncertain, Kriedemann left and relaunched his agency, Plot Twist. “I’m going back to a model a lot more like what I was doing before Showmax, but with a lot more knowledge.” The flip side is that he now has to tackle an interesting question: what does sustainable film publicity look like in an industry where the venture capital era of streaming is over? “The VC money isn’t coming back. So what does it look like to market things in a way that’s impactful without the resources we used to have?”

His instinct for the interesting has also kept alive an ambition that predates everything else. Kriedemann still hopes to return to writing the novels, the stories he set aside when bills and opportunity pulled him in other directions. He hasn’t found the time yet, but he hasn’t let go of it either. All in all, everything boils down to doing interesting work. “When you work with people who do interesting things, that inevitably leads you to work with other people doing interesting things, and their good work brings you good work.”

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Editor’s Note: This essay has been updated to correct Jon Blair’s title, remove the incorrect attribution of Seal Team to the Story Lab program, and clarify the sequence of Kriedeman’s early writing career.

1. First movers

In March, EbonyLife Group announced it was entering the microdrama market with Love Me Twice, a vertical short starring Tobi Bakare, Atlanta Bridget Johnson, and Shine Rossman, and directed by Kayode Kasum, which will be released on EbonyLife ON Plus, the producer’s streaming platform. Around the same time, Toribox, which markets itself as Africa’s first microdrama platform, stepped up promotion ahead of a planned launch later this year.

Taken together, the two developments signal that Africa’s microdrama economy is beginning to shift from speculation to market formation. In Communiqué 104, we argued that the continent was structurally positioned to participate in this shift:

“Africa has yet to get in on the game. The continent has a natural affinity for the format. Many of the systems and values that underpin the explosive growth of microdrama—fast production cycles, dialogue-driven narratives, emotionally charged storytelling, and serialised output—are the same strengths that built traditional African film industries like Nollywood. But what will be the continent’s place in the global market?”

That question is now becoming more concrete. The entry of an established producer such as EbonyLife suggests that microdrama is beginning to attract institutional attention, while Toribox’s positioning points to early attempts at building local distribution infrastructure rather than relying solely on imported platforms and formats. To understand whether these moves mark the beginning of a viable industry, we must examine the economics taking shape beneath them: what it costs to produce microdrama in Africa, where revenues are emerging, and which parts of the value chain are most likely to scale first.

2. Counting the cost

In Nigeria and across Africa, it currently costs about $20,000 to produce a 60-episode microdrama. This compares to roughly $100,000 in the United States and around $50,000 in China. At the lower end of the market, newer platforms are beginning to accept shorter, 30-episode formats in a bid to reduce barriers to entry. These can be produced for as little as $10,000.

The cost differential is not accidental. China’s microdrama industry has already undergone several cycles of iteration and scale. Production pipelines are standardised, talent pools are specialised, and infrastructure is optimised for speed. As a result, the ecosystem benefits from economies of scale that newer markets have yet to develop.

In Africa, costs are still being discovered—and one of the most significant drivers is location. Microdramas tend to trade in fantasies of wealth, social ascent, and domestic intrigue, which means they often need to be shot in houses, offices, and environments that can credibly signal status. Renting a suitable location, usually a house, can cost between $370 and $590. Since shoots usually run between five and seven days, location costs alone can quickly become one of the biggest line items in the budget.

After location, the next major cost is the cast. Microdramas tend to avoid A-list actors. The format prioritises narrative intensity over star power. What keeps audiences returning is not the recognisability of faces, but the momentum of the story itself. That has helped keep acting costs relatively contained, while also allowing producers to test new faces. Daily actor rates range from about $110 to $183, depending on the performer. A budget for three lead actors at $147 each over seven days comes to $3,079.

Also, the format deliberately restricts the number of actors. Microdramas tend to keep the principal cast to three people, or at most five. Beyond that, the story risks becoming too complex. The format depends on speed and a tight, dramatic arc. Too many characters create narrative drag and add cost.

After the location and cast comes the crew. This is another area where the format’s apparent simplicity can be misleading. A microdrama may be short, but it still requires a crew able to work quickly and understand the pacing demands of the format. Crew costs can reach $3,665 for a seven-day shoot, with a minimum of $2,932 for a five-day shoot.

Equipment is another major expense. Rentals range from about $366 to $733 per day, depending on the setup. Some productions can be done with two cameras; others require three. Over seven days, equipment costs range from $2,565 to $5,131. Then there is the script and post-production. A good writer costs about $623 at a minimum. Post-production, which includes editing, colour correction, and sound design, starts at around $2,500. In practice, editing is especially important in microdrama because cliffhangers, emotional beats, and paywall tension have to be engineered with precision. The format compresses production, but it does not remove craft.

3. Money trees

Monetisation is what ultimately determines whether the microdrama industry becomes viable. While production costs set the barrier to entry, revenue defines whether that barrier is worth crossing. In Africa, that revenue model is still taking shape—and it begins earlier in the value chain than expected.

Even before producers recoup their investment from finished episodes, the first lever of monetisation is scriptwriting. Microdrama has created a parallel market for high-concept, serialised storytelling, in which writers are commissioned to develop scripts capable of sustaining dozens of short episodes. In this emerging market, African writers are already earning as much as $1,500 per script, depending on the platform and the strength of the idea. “We commission writers, alumni of the academy, on behalf of global platforms to write microdrama scripts.” Ifeoma Areh, convener of the Digital Creator Academy for Africa, told Communiqué. “This is more than their counterparts in Nollywood make.”

Over time, however, the larger monetisation opportunity is expected to come from global microdrama platforms acquiring content from African producers. This model has already taken hold in more mature markets, where platforms fund production or license completed series to fill their content pipelines.

In Africa, this has not yet begun to happen at scale. But when it does, the economics become clearer. Producers expect to earn in the region of $30,000 per project from platform deals, enough to recoup production costs and generate a margin. The implication is that profitability will depend less on direct audience payments and more on the ability to supply content into a global distribution system. For now, the industry remains in a proof-of-concept phase, with producers still testing the economics of local production and platforms still figuring out how African stories fit into global catalogues.

Africa’s microdrama economy remains early and experimental. But the outlines of a business are beginning to emerge. Production budgets are low enough to allow entry, even if they remain high by local standards. Scriptwriting is already functioning as an early monetisation lever, while platform licensing appears to be the most likely path to scale. What is missing is industry maturity: specialist crews, repeatable workflows, financing structures and distribution systems that can turn isolated projects into a continuous market.

Microdrama offers African film industries a rare chance to enter a global format before its hierarchies fully harden. The question is no longer whether the continent has the storytelling instincts for it. It does. The more important question is whether producers, platforms and creative talent can build the systems required to convert that instinct into a durable commercial advantage. The answer will determine whether microdrama remains a niche experiment or becomes a genuine new growth sector.

Independent journalism on Africa’s creative economy is rare. Help us keep it that way. Communiqué is reader-supported. If our reporting has been useful to you, consider contributing.

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“I filled in the post-its. I filled the boxes. It led us absolutely nowhere.”

It was sometime around 2010. Marie Lora-Mungai was in a Silicon Valley room with her team to meet investors who wanted to help her scale and structure Buni Media for profitability. Her company was behind The XYZ Show, one of the most-watched and celebrated shows in Kenya at the time. The investors were teaching her team the Business Model Canvas: the nine-box framework taught at business schools everywhere to help you build a sustainable business. Lora-Mungai sat there and dutifully filled in the boxes. But in the end, it led nowhere. The framework was not made for an African reality.

At the time, Buni Media was producing political satire in Kenya, a weekly show that mocked politicians, just after a period of post-election violence that had shaken the country. The show was popular and culturally important. It reached millions and won awards. But it could not generate the profits investors expected.

“There are only two ways to make money from a TV show,” she says. “Licensing and brand sponsorship.”

Both were effectively closed to them. Broadcasters paid very little for content, and brands refused to be associated with a show that openly criticised the government. Even those who liked the show stayed away. The risk was too high. In markets where businesses depend on licences, approvals, and political relationships to operate, publicly backing political satire could create real consequences.

In hindsight, it seems obvious. At the time, it was not. “They kept asking us to restructure, to hire differently, to distribute differently,” she says. “Nothing was working because it was not possible.” It is a lesson that would later shape her new book, Creative Cash Flow, which argues that many widely taught business frameworks simply do not translate to African markets.

Lora-Mungai’s career so far is littered with stories like this and, inadvertently, lessons on how not to build in the African creative economy. Ironically, she did not start with that goal in mind. After completing her tertiary education, which included a master’s in Marketing and Communication from ESCP Business School, Paris, she moved to the United States and secured her first job at CNN’s New York bureau. At CNN, she worked in various production roles, including on the shows Paula Zahn Now and Diplomatic License with Richard Roth. During her time at CNN, she covered the 2004 US presidential campaign.

In 2006, she moved to Nairobi to work as a foreign correspondent for different international media platforms, including CNN, Reuters TV, AFP TV, and the BBC.

Then Kenya’s 2007 elections happened, and the post-election violence that followed killed over a thousand people and shook the country to its foundations. In that atmosphere, Lora-Mungai and Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) co-founded Buni Media and launched The XYZ Show: Africa’s first puppet political satire. The two had met before and discussed the idea, but it was the post-election experiences that finally moved her into action. She had grown up watching Les Guignols de l’Info in Paris and had always understood the format’s power; she had just not felt the urgency to act until then.

The XYZ Show featured foam latex caricatures of the very politicians whose rivalry had just torn the country apart. It quickly became popular, airing on Citizen TV, Kiss TV, and later NTV, and winning the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Award for Best TV Series in 2013. At its peak, it reached more than 10 million people every month. In 2014, Lora-Mungai and Gado replicated the formula in Nigeria with Ogas At The Top. In 2012, she launched Buni.tv, one of the pioneers of the Video-On-Demand (VOD) space in Africa, just a few months after IrokoTV launched. The company was later acquired by TRACE TV in 2016.

Today, Lora-Mungai runs Restless Global, an advisory and intelligence firm that works with investors, governments, and institutions trying to enter the African creative economy. Over the last five years, much of her work has involved helping development finance institutions and global companies understand the sector, design investment strategies, and deploy capital.

From the outside, the dominant narrative has long been that investors do not understand the creative industries. From the inside, she saw that investors were learning. “They are a lot more knowledgeable than they were five years ago,” she says.

They were also adapting. Institutions that once operated with minimum cheque sizes in the tens of millions were beginning to adjust their models, creating programmes that could deploy smaller amounts more suited to the realities of the sector. Some were going as low as $100,000 or $500,000, a significant shift for organisations built to operate at much larger scales.

But despite this progress, deals were still not happening at the pace expected. Capital was available. Interest was there. Yet transactions remained limited. So she began to look more closely at the problem. The answer was that the gap was no longer primarily on the investor side. It had shifted to the entrepreneurs. “We’re in a situation where most creative companies are not even business-ready,” she says. Not investment-ready. Business-ready.

In meeting after meeting, she encountered founders who could not answer basic financial questions about their own companies. They could not clearly state their revenue, explain their margins, or describe how their business actually made money. To investors, this signalled not just a lack of polish, but a lack of understanding. And that shuts conversations down quickly. “When you’re asked what your profit is or your burn rate, and you don’t have the answer, that’s not a good look,” she says.

For years, the industry had focused on educating investors. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurs had largely been left to figure things out on their own.

This is the gap her new book, Creative Cash Flow, is trying to close. The book is a practical guide to the business and financial fundamentals that creative entrepreneurs need but are rarely taught. At its core, the book is about helping creatives understand how their businesses actually work. It breaks down concepts like profit and loss, cash flow, margins, and business models in simple language, and explains why they matter. It also shows how to apply them in the specific conditions of African markets.

One of the key arguments in the book is that many widely taught business frameworks are built on assumptions that do not hold in African markets. The Business Model Canvas is her most prominent example. It is widely used, widely taught, and, in her view, largely ineffective in this context. “It doesn’t work at all for the African continent,” she says.

The issue is not that the framework itself is flawed, but that it assumes a level of stability and structure that often does not exist. Western business models are built around predictable markets, higher consumer purchasing power, and formal systems. In contrast, many African markets are shaped by volatility, lower spending power, and informal or fragmented structures.

This affects even basic decisions like pricing. In many Western frameworks, pricing is treated as something to optimise. In her experience, it is often constrained. “The price is whatever your customer can pay,” she says. That reality forces a different approach. Instead of starting with the product and setting a price, she argues that entrepreneurs should start by identifying who actually has the money to pay for what they are making, and then build from there.

This idea forms the basis of a framework she introduces in the book, designed specifically for creative businesses operating in these conditions.

The book draws heavily from her own experience, both as a founder and as an advisor. During her time at Buni Media, for example, she learned that traditional hiring methods did not work well for her company. Instead of relying on experienced hires, they built their own talent pipeline by recruiting and training interns. It was more flexible, more cost-effective, and better suited to their needs. That kind of adaptation runs through the book. It is less about theory and more about what has actually worked in practice.

For Lora-Mungai, this moment also marks a shift in her own work. For years, she focused on helping investors understand the creative economy. Now, she is turning her attention to the entrepreneurs. The sequence matters. First, educate. Then, build stronger businesses. Then, connect them to the capital. If it works, the outcome will not just be more funding, but better businesses and more meaningful growth across the sector.

The lesson from that Silicon Valley room still holds. The problem was never just about filling in the boxes. It was about whether the boxes made sense in the first place. With Creative Cash Flow, she is trying to offer an alternative grounded in African realities.

1. Farming content

In September 2025, Tech Safari, a publication that had built a reputation for explaining African tech to an international audience, launched a weekly newsletter focused on agriculture across Africa. Ag Safari, the new publication, promised to tell stories about agribusinesses in the same way Tech Safari had covered technology startups, breaking down opportunities that investors and operators might be missing.

Choosing agriculture wasn’t accidental. Across the continent, the sector contributes significantly to GDP but remains underinvested and under-innovated compared to others like fintech. Ag Safari started by profiling startups from the German development agency GIZ’s agritec programme, grouping them by sector to tell broader industry stories. One early piece examined Africa’s dairy industry and why most Africans drink powdered milk instead of fresh milk. However, the newsletter has since evolved beyond startup spotlights to focus on the economic opportunities and systemic challenges that hold the sector back. Within seven months, Ag Safari has grown to over 3,000 subscribers, with more than 80% being C-suite executives and senior stakeholders in agribusinesses.

The agriculture newsletter represents just one part of Tech Safari’s broader business evolution. Earlier this month, the company cemented that evolution with a rebrand that repositioned it from a single publication into a parent brand overseeing multiple entities. Tech Safari now operates recruitment services, runs specialised summits, and has launched programmes targeting the African diaspora. What began as a tech newsletter is quietly becoming something more expansive: a multi-vertical media and services company using information, talent, and convening power to shape key African industries.

2. Origin story

Tech Safari started in 2022. Its founder, Caleb Maru, was travelling across the continent after leaving his job in post-conflict reconstruction. He had spent three years helping to stabilise countries after wars, but found the work wasn’t delivering the impact he had hoped for. He saw bigger opportunities in Africa’s growing tech sector.

Maru began writing LinkedIn posts about his observations of the tech industry. The content resonated particularly with international audiences. A breakthrough came with a single post: Maru created a graphic showing all the people who had left Nigerian payments company Paystack to start their own companies, calling it the “Paystack Mafia”. The post went viral, attracting founders, investors, and media professionals who wanted to connect. That response convinced Maru that something bigger was happening.

He quit his job and moved into his parents’ spare room in Australia for three months, committing to writing about African tech every day. The experiment worked. His posts consistently went viral, building an engaged following of industry insiders and international observers. However, Maru wanted to test whether this digital engagement translated into a real-world community. In 2023, he travelled to the United States and organised meet-ups in San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York. Expecting perhaps 15 people at each event, he was surprised when more than 100 attended almost all of them.

The meet-ups proved that Maru had built something more valuable than a publication; he had created a community of people working in African tech who wanted to connect. That realisation shifted Maru’s thinking from creating content to gathering people, setting the stage for everything that followed. The challenge then became figuring out how to turn that community into a sustainable business while continuing to serve the audience’s needs.

3. The Tech Safari playbook

In Communiqué 75, we wrote about how media businesses can build adjacent businesses on top of their core media product:

“The concept of media as a means to an end is simple: media companies can use the skills they’ve developed in audience engagement, trust, and distribution to test, build, and scale other business ventures. It is the idea that content doesn’t have to be the final product. Instead, it can serve as a platform—a lab, if you will—for testing ideas that have the potential to scale.”

Tech Safari’s growth has closely followed this trajectory. The company first created successful events and helped other organisations tap into its community. Those early meet-ups evolved into more structured gatherings across African cities, consistently drawing hundreds of attendees. This success led to a more focused offering: the Tech Safari Summit, which brought together growth and marketing professionals helping companies figure out how to scale across Africa.

Next came talent, driven by what was already happening within its ecosystem, where people came together to collaborate, connect, and consistently find jobs, investment, and partners at Tech Safari’s events. This organic networking pointed towards the company’s next business line: talent sourcing. Recognising how effectively its community connected job seekers with employers, Tech Safari formalised these interactions into a structured offering called Talent Safari.

“We ran a test to see if we could build a recruitment business,” Caleb Maru told Communique. “We said let’s try it for a few months, and we ended up trying it out for a year. It worked, became a six-figure business, and is profitable.” Talent Safari now operates as a mid-level recruitment platform, leveraging Tech Safari’s community to help employers find candidates across African markets. Some of its clients include Paystack, HoneyCoin, and Turaco.

The agriculture vertical emerged differently. Rather than growing organically from its existing audience, Ag Safari launched through a partnership with GIZ and the World Bank. These organisations have long been involved in unlocking Africa’s agricultural potential. The reasoning was clear: agriculture remains one of the continent’s most important sectors, yet it continues to face coordination challenges.

“There are a number of partners trying to mobilise in this space and struggling,” Maru said. “Given the billions of investment going into the space, if you can create a trusted platform and spaces where you bring people together, you can provide real value to these organisations.”

Building on Ag Safari’s media product, the company launched the Ag Safari Summit, bringing together agribusiness executives, development agencies, and investors for focused discussions on scaling agricultural innovation across the continent. The event attracted partners, including GIZ, the World Bank, and the United Nations, who funded the summit to facilitate connections between financiers, government officials, and agritech companies.

Alongside tech and agriculture, Tech Safari has also begun building a third vertical focused on the African diaspora. This is a natural extension of its early audience. From the beginning, Tech Safari’s content resonated strongly with Africans living abroad—people working in global tech ecosystems but interested in opportunities back home. The early U.S. meet-ups were proof of that demand.

Now, the company is developing programmes specifically targeted at this group. Its diaspora initiative, Building Back Home, targets African diaspora professionals, particularly those in Europe and North America, to help them relocate to the continent to build meaningful ventures. The programme goes beyond typical “move back to Africa” initiatives by focusing on economic impact rather than cultural connection.

The initiative recognises a significant opportunity: millions of Africans living abroad have accumulated capital, skills, and networks that could accelerate development if deployed on the continent. However, most lack the local knowledge, connections, and support systems needed to make the transition successfully.

Building Back Home provides structured support through a fellowship programme that helps diaspora professionals identify opportunities, navigate regulatory environments, and build local networks before making the move. The programme represents a long-term bet that diaspora talent and capital can become a major driver of African economic growth.

Tech Safari’s evolution from newsletter to multi-vertical platform reflects broader changes in how media companies can build sustainable businesses in emerging markets. By focusing on trust and community rather than traditional advertising models, the company has created multiple revenue streams while serving specific industry needs.

This “Media as a means to an end” model appears scalable. Each vertical follows a similar playbook: identify an underserved market, create high-quality content to build credibility, and then develop services and events that address that community’s practical needs. This approach has allowed Tech Safari to generate revenue from day one.

As African economies continue developing, demand for specialised business intelligence and networking will likely grow. Companies like Tech Safari that can combine content, community, and services around specific sectors are positioning themselves to capture significant value in this evolution.

At the close of last year, we made a decision. A giant leap for Communiqué IRL. We decided to take our signature networking series beyond Africa.

Why, you may ask? Because Africans are everywhere. Our creators, innovators, and cultural leaders are shaping conversations, systems, and industries worldwide. African creativity is influencing culture, commerce, and communities in ways that borders can’t contain.

We realised it’s time to build bridges where Africans in the diaspora who are actively shaping the creative economy can connect, share, and contribute to ongoing conversations. Where we can explore together: the gaps, the challenges, and the opportunities in the global creative ecosystem.

Our first stop is London.

• Date: Friday, June 19, 2026

• Time:  5–9 PM (GMT+1)

 Seats are limited, RSVP here to secure your slot.

As always, you can expect:

• Deep, thoughtful conversations on the connection between the U.K. and Africa’s creative economy

• Light bites, drinks, and opportunities to share your ideas and build collaborations

This is a big step for us. We’re thrilled to finally connect with our community in London in person, and we hope you’ll join us. If you’re interested in partnering on this edition, reach out to partnership@communiquehq.com.

“When African stories are told well, I think the world might experience a new kind of civilisation, because that’s the only last frontier of cultural experience that the world hasn’t even touched or explored yet.”

Ferdy Adimefe is not a filmmaker in the traditional sense. He has never animated a single frame. He cannot draw. What he can do is see things before they exist. Stories, worlds, civilisations.

He saw them as a child in the southern Nigerian city of Port Harcourt, arranging pebbles on the floor and assigning each one a character. He saw them as a teenager, printing a four-page newsletter and distributing it to churches across the city. He sees them now as the founder of Magic Carpet Studios, one of Nigeria’s most ambitious animation companies, building what he calls an entertainment ecosystem, a machine for turning African mythology, folklore, and literature into globally scalable intellectual property.

The animation industry is worth $300 billion globally. Africa accounts for less than 4% of it. Adimefe wants to change that. But to see how, you have to start at the beginning

Adimefe grew up as the third child and first son of six in a household shaped by stories. His mother was a primary school teacher who named him Ferdinand after a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and kept African Writers Series titles around the house. In the evenings, his grandmother, who lived with them, kept the tradition of African folktales alive. “Most of the evenings we’d gather around the fire,” he recalls. “She would tell us stories from her growing-up years. We would sing with her.” It was an early education in the power of a well-told story.

It was also a childhood saturated with imagination. Adimefe read everything: his mother’s teacher manuals, his sisters’ Hints and Hearts magazines, fiction, science textbooks. By his teenage years, he had joined a Christian drama group called The Box, which was reimagining the Christmas story as a stage play. It was there, performing and building, that Adimefe first found his people, a community of creatives in Port Harcourt.

Despite all of this, he was a Science student. A very good one. When it came time to apply to university, he chose medicine, partly pushed by his mother and partly by the logic that good science grades pointed in that direction. He got into the University of Port Harcourt Medical School, studying human anatomy, with plans to transition into clinical medicine and eventually become a doctor. That plan ended in a cadaver room.

In his second year, standing over a body being dissected, Adimefe realised with sudden clarity that Medicine was not his calling. He had never liked the sight of blood. He had never questioned whether he actually wanted to be a doctor, only that he was good at the subjects that led to it. He considered switching to Psychology or Economics, but the school counsellor told him he could only move within the Faculty of Science. So he finished his Anatomy degree, and then he left.

The pivot to storytelling did not happen all at once. During a university strike that sent students home for a year, Adimefe was invited to speak to a group of teenagers at a Bible school his cousin attended. He had never given a talk before. He went anyway. Afterwards, a man in the audience told him he liked the way he spoke and asked him to write his speech up as an article. Someone else suggested he could turn the article into a newsletter. He did. He called it Hallmark, a printed, four-page bulletin focused on inspiring stories about people, and began distributing it to secondary schools across Port Harcourt.

The response surprised him. He gave a copy to his pastor, who made it the subject of his sermon that Sunday and asked Adimefe to stand up in front of the congregation. “I was embarrassed, I hated to be the centre of attention. I wanted so much for the ground to open for me to go in.” But the attention came anyway, and with it, momentum. When he returned to campus, Hallmark became a magazine. Most people who knew him at university knew him as an editor, not an Anatomy student.

After graduating, he worked briefly as a copywriter at an advertising agency. Before moving to Century Group, an oil and gas company, where he spent five years as a brand manager, earning well, growing bored, and feeling, as he puts it, that he had betrayed his creative side.

In 2015, he resigned to start Imaginarium, a creative technology and brand innovation agency, built on the belief that advertising had become stale and that brands needed new ways to tell stories. Everyone thought he had lost his mind, leaving a lucrative job to start an agency. But he wanted to be solely focused on Imaginarium. “I felt for the longest time that I’d betrayed my creative side,” he says. “And I wanted so much to get in touch with it. I felt that if I combined the oil company job and the agency, I wouldn’t give it my best.” Within a month of resigning, he had his first client, a governorship campaign in Delta State. It was proof enough. He kept going.

Imaginarium grew. They got a Value Added Service (VAS) license from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and began to distribute content for the federal government, working with telecoms companies like MTN and Etisalat. It was not glamorous work, but it was sustainable, and that sustainability was what allowed Adimefe to pursue what he actually wanted to build.

Magic Carpet Studios came out of a question he asked his team one afternoon: if we had to adapt a piece of African literature into a film, what would it be? His team voted for The Passport of Mallam Ilia, a 1960 novel by Cyprian Ekwensi about a Fulani cattle herder journeying across Northern Nigeria in search of the man who caused his wife’s death. Adimefe thought it was a great choice. “I remember reading The Passport of Mallam Ilia back then and falling in love with it,” he says. “It was very cinematic. It had this very pictorial way of telling the story.” They tracked down the author’s daughter, who lived in Atlanta, secured the rights, and announced the project. That was 2018.

What followed was a masterclass in the gap between ambition and infrastructure. When they began recruiting animators, they discovered that Nigeria essentially had none, at least not at the quality the project required. The handful of people who showed up to audition were passionate but undertrained. A co-production opportunity with a South African company emerged, but it came with an $8 million budget requirement, half of which Magic Carpet would need to raise. The highest-grossing Nollywood film at the time, The Wedding Party, had made roughly ₦452 million ($1.72 million) at the box office. Raising $4 million in that environment was not realistic. By 2020, the South African partners had pulled out. Then COVID arrived.

Rather than abandon the project, Adimefe did something that would define Magic Carpet’s identity: he built the talent that didn’t exist. In 2021, the studio launched a training school. For two years, they taught animation to young Nigerians, slowly assembling the team that would eventually work on the film. “It took us about two years to deepen the quality of talent,” he says. “For two years, our pace was very slow because we had only the core hands working on it while we were training.” Today, 90% of the people working on The Passport of Mallam Ilia are locally trained graduates of that programme. Production fully resumed in 2024, after a successful raise on Wefunder. The film is now expected to be released before the end of this year.

While The Passport of Mallam Ilia was in development, Magic Carpet built a second IP: Meet the Igwes, a 13-part animated family series, think The Simpsons, but rooted in Nigerian family life, exploring the love and friction between siblings and parents, and the texture of growing up in this part of the world.

Adimefe is also building what he calls Magic Carpet Venture Studio, a $10 million IP-focused fund, structured like a Y Combinator for African creators. The model is simple in theory: identify promising IPs, incubate the creators behind them, help them build communities around their work, and then license or sell to international streamers from a position of ownership rather than desperation. The fund is expected to launch by August 2026.

The urgency behind all of this is not abstract. Adimefe points to a statistic from the Director General of the African Continental Free Trade Area: of the roughly $100 billion generated annually by Nigerian music, only 2% returns to the country. The rest flows to the platforms, labels, and distributors that own the infrastructure. Iwaju, the Disney+ animated series set in a futuristic Lagos, is a Nigerian story, but the IP belongs to Disney. Iyanu, the HBO animated series drawn from Yoruba mythology, is a Nigerian story, but the IP belongs to Lionforge and Warner Bros.

“What we want to do in Magic Carpet,” Adimefe says, “is to let our people own a piece of the pie.”

There is a version of this story that is simply about one man’s persistence, the pebbles on the floor, the newsletter, the cadaver room, the oil and gas job he left, the animation talent that didn’t exist, the co-production that fell apart, the pandemic, and then, finally, the film. That story is true, and it is worth telling.

But the larger story is about what would happen when a continent with the world’s richest untapped mythology—Sango, Queen Amina, the empires, the folktales and the cosmologies—finally builds the infrastructure to tell its own stories on its own terms. Adimefe believes that moment is arriving. He has spent the better part of a decade making sure Magic Carpet is there when it does.

Editor’s note: The essay has been updated to accurately reflect the plot of The Passport of Mallam Ilia and the IP ownership of Iyanu.