“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.

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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.

1. A boom masking a quiet bust

By most measures, 2025 was a great year for Lagos-based publisher, Masobe Books. Sanya, a mythology fantasy novel by author Oyin Olugbile, won the prestigious NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature, taking home its $100,000 prize. Of the 11 books longlisted for the prize last year, five were written by Masobe authors, reinforcing the publisher’s position as one of the most influential players in Nigeria’s resurgent literary scene. It was the kind of momentum that typically signals a publishing house in ascent: critical acclaim, industry recognition, and growing commercial returns. But when Othuke Ominiaboh, Masobe’s founder and CEO, sat down to review the company’s numbers for the year, they told a more complicated story.

Sales volumes were slipping. Masobe sold roughly 40,000 copies of its titles in 2025, down from nearly 60,000 the year before. Yet, paradoxically, revenue had reached an all-time high. On paper, the business looked healthier than ever. In reality, the foundation it depended on, an active, growing base of readers, was beginning to erode. “It looks like we are making more money right now,” Ominiaboh said to Communiqué. “But what do you think it will be in the next five years? Because that pool is going to keep shrinking, especially with our economic realities.”

That contradiction between rising revenues and a shrinking readership captures a deeper structural tension within Nigeria’s book industry. As inflation climbs and disposable income tightens, books are increasingly treated as discretionary spending, pushed further down the list of everyday priorities. For publishers, this creates a fragile equilibrium: higher prices may sustain revenue in the short term, but they risk accelerating the long-term decline in readership.

It is this tension that has pushed Masobe to experiment beyond traditional publishing. In late March, the company launched a subscription-based mobile app, offering readers access to its book catalogue, with audiobooks expected to follow. More than a new product, the app represents Masobe’s attempt to answer a question that has long haunted the Nigerian literary ecosystem: how do you build a sustainable reading culture and a viable business in an economy where books are increasingly becoming a luxury?

2. The making of Masobe

Masobe Books was built on the promise of expanding access to Nigerian stories. For Othuke Ominiaboh, that idea was deeply personal. Filled with a new zest for life after surviving a kidney transplant, he decided to self-publish his novels. But printing books was only half the problem; getting them into readers’ hands was the other half. Ominiaboh took matters into his own hands. He embarked on a cross-country road trip, physically distributing his books across Nigeria. Along the way, he encountered a pipeline of writers just like him, talented but unpublished. “I came across some very solid manuscripts, and it dawned on me there was a gap in the market,” he told The Guardian in 2025. Established publishers, he argued, “were looking outwards, not inwards”, focusing on reprinting titles already successful in Western markets while local writers struggled to get their voices heard.

That realisation became the foundation for Masobe. With a $7,000 loan from his sister, Ominiaboh set up the company, positioning it as a home for contemporary Nigerian fiction. In its early years, affordability was central to the model. Books were priced between ₦3,000 and ₦4,000, within reach for a growing base of urban readers. But the economics that made that model possible would not hold.

The cause of Masobe’s predicament is one shared by nearly every consumer-facing business in Nigeria. When the company launched, the naira traded at roughly ₦300 to the dollar. Today, it hovers around ₦1,400. For a business dependent on imported paper, ink, and printing equipment, the impact has been severe. Titles that once retailed for ₦3,000 now sell for ₦13,000 to ₦15,000. In a country where the national minimum wage is ₦70,000 a month, a single hardcover novel can cost nearly a fifth of a worker’s income.

The effect on readership has been predictable. Core audiences, such as students, have been priced out. In the vacuum, an informal market has flourished. On Telegram and other messaging platforms, pirated PDFs of Masobe titles are sold for ₦300 to ₦500, a fraction of the official price. Efforts to shut them down have proven largely ineffective. Yet, for Ominiaboh, piracy has also revealed something important: the demand for books has not disappeared but has shifted to where they can be afforded. The new Masobe app is his attempt to meet his audience where they are.

3. Middleground

The idea for the Masobe app had been gestating for nearly three years before it became a product. Initially, Masobe wanted a rental model, where users could pay to access a particular book for a limited period, but it eventually set that aside in favour of a subscription model. Ominiaboh is careful to frame the app not as a strategic pivot but as an additional distribution channel. “It’s like what we have with our books stocked at Roving Heights and other bookstores. The Masobe app is just another store.” However, this store is designed for a different customer; one who cannot afford to go to a Roving Heights store and who, without a cheaper alternative, might resort to illegal means to read books or simply not read at all.

The app launched with three subscription tiers. The entry-level tier costs approximately ₦1,999 and unlocks two books. The mid-tier, at around ₦3,999, gives access to four to five titles. The top tier, priced at roughly ₦5,999, opens the full catalogue, subject to a cap of 15 titles in a user’s library at any one time. The prices are not yet set in stone, as the publisher is still monitoring what the market can bear.

Author compensation is designed to mirror traditional sales. Each time a subscriber adds a book to their library, a fixed amount, between ₦500 and ₦1,000, depending on the title, is credited to the author’s account as a royalty-generating transaction. Masobe’s existing contracts with authors already included e-book and audiobook rights, so there was no need to renegotiate rights before the launch.

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4. Beating the ghost of OkadaBooks

Any discussion of digital reading in Nigeria must eventually reckon with OkadaBooks, the platform that came closest to cracking the market before shutting down in November 2023, citing rough economic conditions. At its peak, OkadaBooks had approximately 400,000 active readers and a catalogue of around 40,000 original books. Its closure has since hardened into a cautionary tale, cited as evidence that subscription models cannot work in Nigeria and Africa at large, that consumers, as the conventional wisdom goes, will not pay for digital content. Subscription streaming platforms have also struggled to survive on the continent, with Canal+-owned Showmax becoming the latest casualty in March this year, further reinforcing the narrative.

But Masobe is not trying to be the Netflix for African books. It is attempting something more pragmatic: an online bookstore for underserved readers priced out of physical books. Its internal benchmark reflects that restraint. Ominiaboh says the business can break even at around 15,000 subscribers, a fraction of Okada Books’ peak. Yet the ambition is still expansive. In a best-case scenario, Masobe aims to reach the 400,000-user ceiling. The gap between those two numbers—survival at 15,000, and scale at 400,000—is where the model will be tested.

For Masobe’s subscription app to be sustainable, three things have to hold. First is pricing discipline. The app works because it collapses the cost barrier that has pushed readers towards piracy. At roughly ₦1,000 to ₦6,000 per month, it reframes books from a high-ticket, one-off purchase into a recurring, lower-stakes expense. But that balance is delicate. Price too high, and it replicates the exclusion of print. Price too low, and it struggles to cover author payouts and platform costs.

Second is catalogue strength. Unlike streaming platforms that rely on sheer volume, Masobe’s advantage lies in curation. Literary prizes and critical acclaim have already validated its catalogue, but that alone will not be enough to sustain a subscription product. A closed catalogue limits choice, and choice is central to how users perceive value in subscription models. Also, to compete with piracy, where readers can access a wide range of titles across publishers, Masobe needs breadth as much as depth. That means bringing other publishing houses onto the platform, expanding beyond its own imprint to offer a more comprehensive digital bookshelf. The company is already in talks with local publishers to make this possible. If it can pair its curatorial strength with a broader catalogue to offer books that readers feel compelled to seek out, it can create a pull strong enough to convert even reluctant subscribers.

Third is distribution behaviour. The app’s success depends less on converting existing bookstore customers and more on capturing the shadow market currently served by piracy. This is where its model diverges from OkadaBooks. Rather than betting on discovering new readers at scale, Masobe is targeting existing readers who transact informally. If the app can offer convenience and reliability, it stands a better chance of shifting that behaviour.

Masobe is not the only platform exploring new distribution models for African literature. Storipod, a microblogging platform that serialises stories in the form of social media stories, is also rethinking how literature is consumed and monetised. Its model seeks to expand access to African literature by allowing readers to unlock books chapter by chapter. Once accessed, chapters remain in a user’s digital library. On Monday, Storipod announced a deal with Narrative Landscape Press to publish books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on its platform, alongside works by Chude Jideonwo, Adorah Nworah, Pede Hollist, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and Nikki May.

Taken together, these experiments point to a broader shift in how African literature is being packaged, priced, and distributed, less as a static product, and more as a flexible, mobile-first experience shaped by the economics of attention and affordability.

The Masobe app recorded 5,000 downloads in its first week, an early signal that it may be tapping into a real, if underserved, demand. The challenge now is retention: turning those downloads into paying, repeat users. Masobe is attempting both a product experiment and a bet on behaviour change. If it succeeds, it could begin to redraw the economics of publishing in Nigeria.

Across Africa’s media and creative industries, there is no shortage of stories. What is missing is journalism that goes beyond events to explain the economics, incentives, and structural forces underneath. The Communiqué Editorial Bootcamp was designed to meet that need.

After reviewing a strong pool of applications from across the continent, we selected a small cohort of participants who demonstrated talent, curiosity, discipline, and systematic thinking. This cohort reflects the diversity of Africa’s media landscape, from film and music to data journalism, climate reporting, and digital storytelling. This is a remarkable group, and we are looking forward to the work they produce.

Meet the cohort

Shalom Tewobola is a Lagos-based culture journalist and prose writer with bylines in Culture Custodian, NATIVE, and Isele. She has covered Sundance 2026 and currently leads a flagship culture newsletter at Pulse.

Samantha Mzee is a Kenya-based communications professional and investigative data journalist. A Thomson Reuters Foundation fellow, she focuses on illicit financial flows, transparency, and social impact reporting across Africa.

Imani Alpha is a Kenyan storyteller and founder of Ukumbini, an Afrofuturist storytelling lab. His work connects narrative, policy, and capital flows to explore inclusive futures in Africa’s digital ecosystem.

Eva Anya is the Managing Editor at What Kept Me Up, where she covers Nollywood and African cinema. She focuses on both independent and mainstream filmmakers, driven by a deep love for storytelling.

Abioye Damilare Samson is a Nigerian music journalist who has written for Afrocritik, The Republic, and Newlines. He covers pop culture, identity, and urban life.

Gideon Kofi Nyamekye is a Ghanaian journalist and managing editor of KickGH, with years of experience shaping football narratives in Ghana.

David Olayiwola is the Content Lead at WeTalkSound, overseeing editorial for a 500,000+ strong community. His work spans journalism, music publishing, and PR for top African artists.

Deborah Bodunde is a journalist at TheCable covering climate and public-interest issues. Her work examines how policy and infrastructure affect vulnerable communities.

Ephreeda Banda is a Journalism Master’s candidate at Rhodes University. Her work explores media, culture, and digital discourse in South Africa.

Michael Kiptoo is a Kenyan media professional and storyteller published in Rafiki Anthology and Qwani. His work focuses on thoughtful, perspective-driven narratives.

Nora Anyasodo is a communications and community professional working across storytelling, research, and digital engagement, with a focus on the creative economy and digital culture.

Tony Awiti is the Lead Social Media Strategist at Africa Uncensored, translating investigative reporting into impactful digital narratives in Kenya and across Africa.

Seyi Lasisi is a film critic and Senior Staff Writer at Culture Custodian, focused on documenting and analysing African cinema.

John Eriomala is a culture journalist and medical student at UI, with bylines in The Republic, NATIVE, and Afrocritik. His work explores music, film, and the human condition.

Momanyi Ian is a Kenyan based communication and media specialist focused on digital marketing, PR, and the African music industry, with a growing interest in journalism and Africa’s creative economy.

“Growing up, I wanted to travel, but I didn’t know how I would do it. And so journalism was, I guess, one way of doing it.”

For Tshepo Tshabalala, becoming a journalist was a way to explore the world, to listen to the beautiful stories of other people. His 15-year-old self would never have imagined doing all that and more, while making journalism better in the modern world.

Tshabalala, who now serves as Project Manager and Team Leader for JournalismAI, spent the better part of a decade working at Jamlab, Africa’s first-ever journalism innovation lab. But the road to both ran through a small town in the Northwest Province of South Africa, and it started with his grandfather and a stack of newspapers.

Tshabalala spent much of his formative years in Jericho, a town of less than 10,000 people, with his grandfather, a newspaper deliveryman who also worked in many other jobs. He later moved to Pretoria to live with his parents during high school. There, he became curious about student leadership and joined the school paper to meet and interview student leaders. “That’s where my passion for understanding more about people and what makes them tick started.” The school publication lasted until grade 10, his third year, before it was shut down due to declining interest. Even so, the experience left a lasting impression. “That’s where the life of journalism started. And I knew from then on that it’s something that I had wanted to do.”

At home, television expanded his sense of what journalism could be. He watched reporters travel widely, driven by curiosity. Lifestyle show Top Billing introduced him to a glossier form of journalism that had nothing to do with wars or press conferences, while The Amazing Race offered a fast-paced, global adventure. He connected these influences into a single idea: journalism could be the vehicle. “All those different shows contributed to that idea that, as a journalist, I could potentially travel or use journalism as a way of travelling and meeting people.”

His father wasn’t convinced when Tshabalala announced his intention to study journalism at a university far from home. At the time, he did not yet have access to the internet, so his father bought two large books listing all the possible careers a young man could pursue. “I just couldn’t find anything that was appealing. And I was like, maybe a graphic designer. And he’s like, no, that’s not a job. Find something else.”

The standoff ended when his uncle visited. He had a son the same age and in the same position. His uncle advised Tshabalala’s father to let him be. His father relented, but with a condition. “I never want a child who will ask me for money while they are supposedly earning a salary.”

He studied for a diploma in Journalism at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), near Pretoria, where his parents lived. The school was not his first choice. “I wanted to go to university far away from home. And my dad was like, ‘No child of mine is going far away. You’re going to go to the closest university.’” Affordability also mattered; his parents were teachers.

It turned out that going to TUT was the right call. The campus sat in a township, while he had grown up in the suburbs. The culture shock was both real and clarifying. Being around students from different backgrounds and hearing fragments of lives unlike his own made journalism feel even more necessary. The programme was also practical. “We did theory, but for the most part, they taught you what you would be doing on the job.” By graduation, students could walk into a newsroom and report confidently. Tshabalala took full advantage, trying different forms of journalism—writing, presenting, and working at the campus radio station, which he loved.

After his diploma, he applied for an honours programme at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), partly for the education and partly for the credentials. “We know that perspective or perceptions play a role in a lot of things. Wits gave me a bigger exposure to what else could be done as a journalist.”

The Wits honours cohort was small and competitive, and it came with scholarships funded by major media organisations. Tshabalala landed a Reuters scholarship, which meant that, at the end of the year, he would complete an internship at the news organisation’s local office. When Tshabalala left TUT and enrolled at Wits, he hadn’t yet decided which kind of journalism he wanted to pursue, but the internship at Reuters made him consider financial journalism. “Financial journalism allowed me to really tap into my curiosity and learn more about how politics is connected to money and how money is connected to people.”

The internship was meant to last six months, but stretched to nine. When it ended, a Reuters editor introduced Tshabalala to the editor at Forbes Africa, who encouraged him to apply for a job there. He got the role and spent three years there, a period he describes as “amazing” because it allowed him to live the dream of writing stories while travelling. “With Forbes, I got to travel the continent for the first time. I went to Mozambique and Uganda and got to interview some of the continent’s leading entrepreneurs.”

While at Forbes, he began considering a return to school for a master’s degree. That, combined with a desire to slow down, led him to Business Day, where he worked as a web producer. Instead of chasing stories, he edited and uploaded them. It was quieter work, but it gave him room to breathe and to pursue further studies. During this period, he completed two postgraduate degrees: one at Stellenbosch University and another at the University of York, funded by a Chevening Scholarship.

The defining pivot in his career came almost by accident. After returning from York, he sent a thank-you note to a former Wits lecturer, who replied with an opportunity to join a new initiative: the Journalism and Media Lab (Jamlab). At the time, Africa had no equivalent to the journalism innovation labs already active in the US and Asia. Jamlab set out to fill that gap by running a publication, an accelerator, and documenting the evolution of media on the continent.

“I thought maybe this could be another way that would allow me to travel on the continent, learning more about innovation in journalism and media. And telling it from an African perspective rather than relying on Western publications to tell our narratives and our stories.”

He became the lab’s editor, working closely with startups coming through the accelerator. Many were genuinely exciting: a platform focused on women’s representation in news media, Nigeria’s The Republic, and Politically Aweh, a YouTube channel making politics accessible to young audiences. Each was trying to solve a problem that mattered. “I think the beauty of work is that it opens you up to other forms of work. Right when you are studying, or when you’re in high school, you are not exposed enough to know what else you can do within a certain industry or career path.”

At Jamlab, that exposure became real. He began to see beyond journalism, beyond reporting and to its operational side. He began to learn how media startups were built and run, and how founders thought about sustainability, audiences, and growth. After three years as editor, Tshabalala gradually took on more leadership when his director fell ill. What started as a temporary adjustment became permanent. “It became more admin than doing the actual [editing] work,” he says, “but it was a nice learning curve into moving into management.”

The travel he had hoped for did not come in quite the volume he expected. Instead, he found opportunities to participate in various journalism innovation programmes around the world. One instance was when he was invited to coach, virtually, on a product immersion programme at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. It was during this programme that he met Mattia Peretti, then project manager for JournalismAI.

In mid-2022, Tshabalala left Jamlab and took several months off work. He was still on that break when Paretti reached out. Paretti was stepping back from his role at JournalismAI. The position was being advertised. No guarantees, he said, but apply if you’re ready. Tshabalala applied. Three rounds of interviews later, he got the job. There was one condition: he would have to do it from London.

He arrived in February 2023, three months after ChatGPT broke into global consciousness and sent the media industry into a collective spiral. JournalismAI had been doing this work since 2018; the world was only now catching up. “By the time I joined, it was a baptism of fire,” he says, “because now I was learning about AI at the same time as all the other journalists in the world.” The invitations to conferences followed almost immediately. He was on the move again, this time as a voice at the frontier of journalism’s most uncertain moment.

The work is straightforward in its mission: help newsrooms, especially smaller ones, understand and use AI in ways that strengthen rather than undermine what they do. The big outlets have the resources to work it out themselves. Everyone else needs support, training, research, and practical guidance. “The idea is to support innovation and capacity building to make AI, or the potential of AI, more accessible to news organisations around the world,” he says.

If his fifteen-year-old self in Pretoria could see where the plan ended up, Tshabalala thinks he would be satisfied. “I went for what I wanted, and I’ve achieved a lot of the goals that I set for myself.”

1. A balancing act

Growing up in Nigeria, culinary creator Victor Felix, better known as Chef Felz, learned early that cooking was not considered a man’s job. In many households, the kitchen belonged to women. For a boy who loved food and found meaning in its preparation, this was an early constraint. He became a chef anyway. But before that, he was a writer and performance poet preoccupied with questions of gender equity. His university thesis focused on feminism, and he adopted the label without hesitation. The kitchen and the page, in retrospect, were not so different. Both spaces were avenues for storytelling.

In late 2024, a friend sent Felix the link to apply for the Entertainment & Media Hubs Creator Economy Incubator by Co-creation Hub (CcHUB), a Lagos-based technology and innovation centre.

CcHUB was running a gender-equity storytelling bootcamp in the lead-up to the launch of its creative-industry hub. It aligned with everything Felix stood for, so he applied and got in. What followed was a three-month process, structured in phases. It began with a residential week focused on coursework, community, and gender discourse, followed by sessions with industry practitioners on storytelling, distribution, and the economics of content. In the final phase, participants pitched story ideas to compete for the final prize.

Felix’s story pitch was personal: a male chef navigating a profession shaped by gendered expectations. It doubled as an argument that ability should matter more than identity. He filmed in Ibadan while completing his compulsory national service, travelling from Lagos with a small crew. In January 2025, he emerged as the winner of the pitch competition.

The ₦5 million prize money came in handy. Felix used it to upgrade his production equipment and set up a new studio in Abuja, where he has since relocated. The results were immediate. Since he joined the boot camp, his audience has more than doubled, from roughly 20,000 to 76,000 followers.

2. A serendipitous start

The gender equity storytelling programme, which Victor Felix participated in, was delivered by CcHUB’s Creative Economy Practice. To understand how a technology hub ended up running a storytelling incubator, and why that is less of a detour than it sounds, it helps to understand one of CcHUB’s founding values: serendipity.

At CcHUB, serendipity is a design principle. The organisation believes that some of the most important outcomes—collaborations formed, ideas sparked, and careers redirected—cannot be planned or documented in advance. They happen when the right people are in the same room. Its physical spaces are built, in part, to increase the probability of those unplanned collisions. It is a philosophy that also explains how CcHUB’s creative economy practice came to exist.

Ojoma Ochai, now its managing director, was working at the British Council when she first encountered CcHUB. It was 2011, and a visiting UK Prime Minister’s delegation was being routed through Lagos. Someone suggested the itinerary include a stop at the newly opened Co-Creation Hub. Ochai, who had not heard of the place, drove to Yaba to see it for herself. Dr Bosun Tijani, co-founder of CcHUB and now Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Communication and Digital Economy, was not there that day; instead, she met his co-founder, Femi Longe. Ochai and Longe went on to co-design a programme called Culture Shift, which brought arts organisations and technology practitioners together to build solutions through hackathons. It was through that work that she eventually met Dr Tijani.

The relationship deepened over the following decade, running parallel to a growing intellectual preoccupation for Ochai. Since 2012, she has been deeply involved in UNESCO’s work on creative economy policy, eventually joining the expert panel for the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the only UN convention specifically concerned with creative industries. She helped governments across the world develop creative economy strategies. Around 2018, she began commissioning research on how West African artists were using technology. Adoption was still nascent, but the direction was clear.

Ochai secured UNESCO funding for a larger study covering 94 countries, examining how the digital environment was reshaping creative industries globally. The central finding of this study was striking: it had become almost impossible to draw a clear line between the digital and creative economies. The broadband networks, the Big Tech platforms, and the data consumption that powered the digital world were all fundamentally driven by people consuming creative content. The two economies were not parallel. They were the same, viewed from different angles.

That conclusion changed everything for Ochai. “It was becoming impossible to distinguish between the digital economy and the creative economy,” Ochai said to Communique. “I started thinking, ‘If this is where the world is going, and Africa hasn’t even started, maybe I should quit my job and explore this.” She called up Dr Tijani and outlined her plan. She wanted to do for creative industries what CcHUB had done for tech. His response was immediate: “It sounds interesting. Can we do it together?”

Within weeks, Ochai developed a business plan, and CcHUB entered as an equity investor. After almost 15 years working at the British Council, Ojoma Ochai resigned to lead the Creative Economy Practice at CcHUB.

3. A long game

Since its founding, CcHUB’s creative economy practice has moved quickly and widely. Its work now spans research, infrastructure, and advocacy, a combination that is making it one of the most consequential organisations in the conversation on Africa’s creative economy.

In May 2022, CcHUB launched the CreaTech Accelerator, a programme designed to support companies operating at the intersection of creative industries and technology. The first cohort included a range of startups, from the fashion-tech platform FashTracker to the animation studio Orange VFX, and creator-commerce startups like Starz App and Twiva. Orange VFX won first place at the end of the accelerator, receiving $20,000 from the Creative Economy Practice. Some of the other companies have continued to scale. Twiva, for instance, has secured follow-on funding from the Sony Innovation Fund and the Jobtech Alliance.

But the accelerator also surfaced a deeper structural issue. Across cohorts, a consistent pattern emerged: there were not enough investment-ready ventures in the ecosystem. The pipeline was thin, and many promising founders lacked the financial literacy, governance structures, and clarity required to attract capital. In response, CcHUB restructured the programme. Investment readiness became a core component embedded from the very beginning. The programme now runs over 18 months, combining six months of intensive, structured support with a longer follow-on period designed to help ventures mature.

But accelerating individual companies only goes so far. To build a thriving creative economy, you also need to understand the ecosystems those companies operate in, which cities are hospitable to creative work, which are detrimental, and why. That question demanded a different kind of tool.

In April 2023, the Creative Economy Practice launched its flagship research product, the Creative Vibrancy Index. The index ranks cities across Africa based on the health and dynamism of their creative ecosystems, measuring indicators such as the density of creative businesses, access to infrastructure, and availability of funding. It currently covers 12 cities across four countries. The index is intended to serve as shared infrastructure for the ecosystem, helping governments, funders, and industry bodies make more informed decisions. A second edition is already in development, with plans to expand city coverage, update existing data, and introduce capacity-building components for local stakeholders.

There is Fashionomics, a programme focused on the fashion industry, which has run multiple cohorts and disbursed $90,000 to winners. And then there is the gender equity storytelling programme, which sits within a broader set of projects funded by the Gates Foundation, focused on improving gender representation in media across Nigeria and Kenya.

The most visible expression of CcHUB’s creative economy ambitions, however, may be its two physical hubs: one in Nairobi, which launched in December 2024, and the other in Lagos, which opened in February 2025. Both are free for community members to use. They offer editing suites, podcast recording rooms, filming areas, training rooms, and event spaces. Together, they are designed to serve 10,000 storytellers across Nigeria and Kenya, with a specific focus on using media to shift cultural norms around women’s economic empowerment.

Over the last five years, CcHUB’s creative economy practice has become a central part of the organisation’s operations, and a bet on where value is being created on the continent. By combining venture support, research, and physical infrastructure, it is attempting something few institutional investors on the continent have done: catalyse the growth of the creative industry.

The results are still early, but the ambition is clear. If it works, the payoff will extend beyond individual careers or companies, providing an example for institutional investors deploying capital in the industry. In that sense, CcHUB is helping define what Africa’s creative industry will become.

“My philosophy in life is this, and I do say this to a lot of people: life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. I had a lifetime of ‘yes.’ I never said no to anything.”

Moky Makura has done a lot: publicist, TV anchor, actress, author, book publisher, communications executive, scriptwriter, and media entrepreneur. Today, she runs Africa No Filter, an organisation dedicated to shifting how the world tells the African story. Looking back, where she has ended up feels almost inevitable. But it wasn’t always like that. It was brute force, driven by sheer will, a refusal to be left behind, and an instinct to seize every opportunity that came her way.

Makura was born in Lagos and spent the first nine years of her life riding bicycles and roller skates through the streets of Ikoyi. “I had a very simple but nice childhood. We used to roam the streets; It was a very idyllic childhood, which doesn’t exist anymore.” Her father raised her to think for herself, to be assertive, and to form her own opinions. “My dad used to treat me like a little adult. So we’d talk about things, and he’d explain things to me.”

By the time she was nine, her older brother was heading to England for secondary school. She decided she was going too. “I was young. I wanted to go because my brother was going. You know, youngest children, sometimes you don’t see why you can’t do things.” The family could afford it, so she got her way. She was placed two classes ahead of her age group, which made the academics harder than they needed to be, mostly because she wasn’t putting in the effort. But boarding school itself suited her perfectly. “Not every child fits into boarding school. I did. I enjoyed it. I stopped missing home quite quickly.”

The one thing that didn’t fit was authority. Being told what to do without being told why didn’t sit well with her. “You couldn’t just tell me something, you have to explain why.” That quality, the refusal to simply comply, would follow her everywhere.

When it was time for university, she chose Buckingham University specifically because it had the highest concentration of Nigerians. The consequence was that the law course she wanted was full, so she ended up doing a mix of Politics, Economics, and Law instead. She graduated with honours and stepped into the job market just as her family circumstances changed significantly. Her father had died, and the family’s money had thinned. If she was going to stay in the UK, she needed a job quickly.

She found her answer in media sales, and it turned out to be the most important first job she could have had. “If you don’t have any money to take a course and you really want to be successful, learn how to sell. It is the best skill set you can have.” She came to believe that selling was at the core of almost everything. “In life, we’re always selling something. I’m selling an idea right now — I’m selling myself to you. Sometimes you’re pitching an idea. People don’t understand that there is sales in everything.”

From media sales, she moved into public relations, recognising it quickly as the same skill in different clothing. “PR people don’t call themselves salespeople, but they’re essentially selling.” She freelanced, then joined an agency, then another. She was good at the work. But she noticed something that bothered her. Promotions weren’t going to the most capable people. They were going to the most connected ones. “I realised that it wasn’t about your capabilities, your knowledge, your expertise, it really was about your connections.”

She decided she wanted to go somewhere her network would actually work for her. Nigeria seemed like the obvious answer, but the timing was bad, the country was under military rule, and her mother warned her off. “Why are you coming back? Now’s not a good time.” So she looked elsewhere. A magazine feature on successful Black women in marketing and communications in South Africa provided a blueprint for her. And even though she did not know anyone in the country, she booked a ticket there anyway.

South Africa brought its own turbulence. When a new job in Cape Town fell apart over a work permit, she drove the eleven hours back to Johannesburg alone, setting off before dawn, watching the sun rise over the flat, dead-straight road through the Karoo. “I remember just thinking: I will never ever let anybody else be responsible for my own destiny.” By the time she arrived, she had made up her mind to start her own business

She set up a PR agency and got her first client the same way she had learned to get everything, by selling. She cold-called an exhibitor whose ad she had spotted in a newspaper. He was taking an exhibition to Nigeria. She told him she had a PR agency there. She didn’t. But by the time the call ended, she had found one she could partner with, put together a proposal, and won the business. She worked with that exhibitor for the next three years.

She eventually sold the agency to the advertising group FCB in 2001, who then employed her to keep running it, retaining both the network she’d built and the freedom she’d been after. But she wasn’t done expanding “I didn’t want to just do PR in South Africa. I wanted to do PR across Africa. Because the gap I saw was that people wanted a one-stop shop. If you wanted to do advertising in 20 countries, you could go to one advertising agency. Nobody was offering that in PR, at least not from South Africa.”

What followed looked, from the outside, like a series of unrelated detours. She joined Carte Blanche, South Africa’s flagship investigative journalism programme, as a Nigerian presenter. She hosted a 26-part marketing show on Summit TV. She acted in the lead role in MNet’s pan-African drama Jacob’s Cross. She co-produced Living It, a lifestyle series about wealthy Africans. She wrote Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, which launched with a foreword by Richard Branson and made the bestseller list in South Africa. She started a publishing imprint, MME Media. She created Nollybooks, a fiction series aimed at getting young Africans to read, and later adapted it for television, co-producing over 20 movies for eTV.

In a 2012 TED Talk, she explained the thread running through it all. It was about finding the other stories, the ones that didn’t make it onto the international news, the ones that looked more like the Africa she actually knew. But that tension, between the continent’s actual complexity and its flattened global image, had been with her since 1985 when she watched Live Aid Concert.

“I remember watching the concert, Queen, all these stars singing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, and all these images of Ethiopia, the famine, were flashed up on the screen. And there was a moment when I realised: but hold on, this is not the Africa I grew up in.”

The Africa she knew was Ikoyi, bicycles, roller skates, and an idyllic childhood. Nobody was coming to save them. The gap between those two realities became the animating force of everything that followed. She was always trying to close it. She just didn’t have the words for it yet. The phrase, she would eventually learn, was narrative change.

She returned to Nigeria to work for Tony Elumelu as head of marketing communications, something she had long wanted to do. But Nigeria proved harder than she had expected, and after some time she returned to South Africa, this time joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as deputy director for communications in Africa. It was there that a project landed on her desk: an initiative called Africa No Filter. She loved it immediately. It was exactly what she had been doing her whole career. But there was no budget for it at the foundation, so she had to let it go.

Although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation could not back Africa No Filter, the initiative secured funding from a consortium of investors, including the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg, the Mellon Foundation, Luminate, and the Open Society Foundation, among others. Not long after, a friend sent Makura a job listing. Africa No Filter was looking for an executive director. “The shoe just fit. Everything about my career, every skill set I have, had set me up for the job.”

Since 2020, Makura has been the Executive Director, leading an organisation that funds storytellers, journalists, and creatives working to change how the world sees the continent. For now, it is where she intends to stay, for as long as the work continues. The only thing that might pull her away is something she quietly thinks about: doing something like this specifically for Nigeria. “If there was something I was called on to do for Nigeria,” she says, “then yeah, I would absolutely put this on hold to do that.”

There is a particular kind of person whose story only makes sense in hindsight. Someone whose choices look scattered until, suddenly, they don’t. Makura is that kind of person. The publicist, the actress, the author, the entrepreneur. Each role was preparation. And now, sitting at the head of an organisation built entirely around the idea that Africa’s story deserves to be told better, she is exactly where all of it was pointing. She just had to get there her own way.

1. A hidden gem

Over the weekend, I saw a stage play with a twist. The storyline was simple: a wealthy merchant must decide who inherits his business empire. Rather than choose between his two sons, he gives them a challenge. Somewhere in the ‘Valley of Hidden Treasures’ lies a fortune lost over two decades ago. The son who finds it first will inherit the business. But this is not your typical tale of sibling rivalry.

What follows is a live musical performance that collapses the distance between the audience and the stage. It unfolds inside a converted film studio in Ikeja, Lagos, reimagined as a rocky valley, where water cascades down artificial stone walls and wind-blown leaves sweep across the auditorium. The audience does not sit still or stay silent. At key moments, they strike predetermined notes on xylophones to move the story forward. They haggle in a live marketplace, trading with gold pouches purchased with real cash. They pick sides and influence outcomes. By the end of the show, one lucky audience member walks away with an actual treasure.

This is Valley of Hidden Treasures, the latest production from Immersia, Anthill Studios’ ambitious bet on immersive storytelling. Through Immersia, one of Nollywood’s most important production houses is experimenting with live entertainment, a wager that, beyond traditional film, it can build a business on live experiences that audiences engage with and pay for repeatedly.

2. Roots

Driving this experiment is Niyi Akinmolayan, one of Nollywood’s most commercially successful directors and the creative force behind some of Nigeria’s most recognisable films, including Prophetess, The Wedding Party 2, Lisabi: The Uprising, and Chief Daddy. When Amazon’s Prime Video launched in Nigeria in 2022, Anthill Studios, Akinmolayan’s production house, was among the first to strike a licensing deal with the streamer.

But somewhere between streaming deals and box office returns, Akinmolayan grew restless. The mechanics of traditional filmmaking; producing a story, distributing it, and with the advent of streaming, watching audiences consume it passively on mobile phones, began to feel insufficient. “Most of the storytelling we do currently, whether it’s in cinema or TV or the stuff you watch on your phone, is very one-dimensional,” Akinmolayan said to Communiqué.

That dissatisfaction sent him back to the roots of African storytelling. Long before cinema, storytelling here was communal, participatory, and immersive. “We’ve always been people who tell stories under a giant tree where everyone listening has to sing along and participate and play instruments,” he said. “I’ve always believed that an interactive form of entertainment is uniquely African.”

At the same time, he saw what he took to be a craft problem emerging in Nigerian theatre. Productions were becoming increasingly minimal, reduced to a screen, a chair, and a table, while audiences were still expected to pay a premium. He felt the artistry was suffering as a result. The solution, as he conceived it, would need to do two things simultaneously: honour the participatory traditions of African storytelling and raise the production bar high enough that audiences felt they were receiving genuine value. Immersia was his answer.

The idea began to take shape in January 2025, but it wasn’t until September that Akinmolayan developed detailed concept notes, production designs, and a creative framework for the first show. The debut production, The Forest of Talking Drums, opened in December 2025 with modest expectations. The team initially planned for 20 shows, but demand pushed that number to 28, with 26 of them selling out completely. Over a 14-day run (two shows per day), Immersia sold 4,634 tickets, generating about ₦75 million ($54,150) in revenue against production costs of ₦50 million ($36,000). That is ₦25 million in pure profit. More telling than the numbers was the audience behaviour. Guests returned with friends, parents, and colleagues to relive the experience.

3. The Cirque du Soleil playbook

The business of live, immersive entertainment has produced some of the most durable and lucrative franchises in the global entertainment industry. Their trajectories offer a blueprint for what Anthill Studios is attempting to build with Immersia.

The most visible example is Disney Experiences, the theme park and live entertainment division of The Walt Disney Company, which generated over $10 billion in revenue in 2025. Its consistent growth over the last few years helped its head, Josh D’Amaro, claim the coveted CEO role of the larger Disney group, succeeding Bob Iger. It was a signal of how central live experiences have become to the company’s long-term strategy. But Disney’s model comes with a built-in advantage: it draws from a century’s worth of beloved characters and stories.

A more instructive comparison is the Canadian circus company, Cirque du Soleil. Unlike Disney, Cirque built its entire business without preexisting IP, instead creating a new category of entertainment defined by spectacle.

Founded in Quebec in 1984 by a group of street performers, Cirque spent its early years touring with distinctive shows that blended acrobatics, theatre, and music. By the late 1980s, the company had generated enough attention to attract Las Vegas casino operators. Those relationships proved transformative.

Cirque’s arrival in Las Vegas helped reposition the city from solely a gambling den into a destination for premium live entertainment. In 1993, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté partnered with casino magnate Steve Wynn to create Mystère, a permanent show at The Mirage. Five years later, another show, La Nouba, opened at Disney World in Orlando. The shift from touring productions to permanent residencies transformed Cirque from a travelling act into a scalable business with predictable revenues and long-term venue partnerships.

International expansion followed into Europe and Asia, and by 2023, Cirque du Soleil sold 10 million tickets across 40 shows worldwide, effectively making a comeback after the COVID-19 pandemic nearly shuttered the business for good.

4. Immersia’s endgame

This is the trajectory Immersia is trying to replicate, but with a uniquely African flavour. However, the path to building a sustainable business runs through uncomfortable terrain.

The most immediate challenge is structural. Nigeria’s live entertainment industry is, by and large, a seasonal business. The Detty December period—when the Nigerian diaspora returns en masse, with discretionary spending spikes, and the country briefly transforming into one of the world’s most concentrated entertainment markets—accounts for a disproportionate share of annual ticket revenue.

Immersia’s Forest of Talking Drums benefited directly from this dynamic. For many attendees, it offered a compelling alternative to the overpriced Afrobeats concerts that dominated the December calendar. The timing was as much a strategic advantage as the product itself.

Outside that window, however, the calculus changes. Valley of Hidden Treasures, which opened in March, sold less than 50% of available tickets on its opening weekend, a significant drop from the frenzy of December. Ticket sales have since picked up. The numbers do not necessarily indicate a flawed product, but they do raise a pointed question: can Immersia build a year-round audience, or is it, for now, a December phenomenon with premium production values?

Answering that question will require Akinmolayan to think less like a filmmaker and more like an entertainment executive building a scalable business, and to develop a multi-pronged monetisation strategy.

The first lever is touring. Rather than anchoring every production to a single Lagos venue, Immersia could take its shows on the road—to Abuja, Port Harcourt, Johannesburg, and Accra—reaching new audiences. Touring also smooths the seasonal revenue problem by distributing shows across the calendar year.

The second lever is corporate and private performances. Nigeria’s corporate entertainment market is chronically underserved. Companies spending millions on end-of-year parties and client events represent a natural audience for bespoke Immersia experiences—productions that could be customised around a brand’s identity while retaining the core immersive format.

The third lever is residencies. Permanent or semi-permanent venues in high-footfall locations, potentially including partnerships with institutions such as the National Theatre and European embassies across the continent, could give Immersia a predictable revenue base.

The fourth, and perhaps most underestimated, lever is merchandising. When The Forest of Talking Drums closed in December, audiences did not just leave with memories; they also tried to take with them the drums they had been given as props to participate in the show. The instinct to possess a piece of the experience is a powerful commercial signal. A deliberate merchandise strategy, built around each production’s signature instruments and artefacts, could add another meaningful and recurring revenue stream.

Immersia is still early—just two productions in. But it has proven that there is demand for a different kind of entertainment. That said, demand alone does not build a business. The harder task is turning that demand into a system: repeatable productions, predictable revenues, and an audience that shows up beyond the seasonal spikes of December.

That transition will define whether Immersia remains an interesting experiment or becomes something more durable. Because what Anthill is attempting is not just to stage better shows, but to build an entirely new model for live entertainment. If it works, the implications would be far-reaching for Africa’s creative economy.

“I’d come home broken, covered in dirt, my uniform ruined. But I remember how it felt to make money. I got my first taste of financial independence through that, but also I had a taste of real life.”

Andile Masuku doesn’t fit into neat boxes, which makes his story hard to write. Maybe it’s because he never sits around waiting for opportunities; he hunts them down. At 17, while waiting for his O-level results, he was already pestering his mother to find him work.

She delivered. A family friend owned a large Spar supermarket and agreed to hire him, but warned he’d get no special treatment. He didn’t. Masuku worked 7 am to 7 pm shifts in the butchery, making sausages, packing bags, and hauling stock. He came home exhausted, uniform dirty, body aching. “It was beautiful work. It was honest work,” he says now.

That first taste of financial independence taught him lessons that still guide how he moves through the world. Today, he juggles journalism, publishing, consulting, and strategy. He’s a podcaster, editor, and advisor. But to him, these aren’t separate identities; they’re all pieces of the same puzzle. Before all that, though, there was just a curious kid who wanted to explore.

Masuku was born in Zimbabwe four years after independence to parents who were both educators. His father was a pastor and theologian; his mother started as a primary school teacher and eventually became a headmistress. “Both of whom, by the time they retired, were academics. They both retired as faculty deans,” he said to Communique.

His childhood was comfortable. He credits his Montessori preschool education with shaping his approach to learning and entrepreneurship. “Montessori preschool is unstructured learning and play that really sets you up to become an independent explorer in the world.” That independence got tested early. When Masuku was in Grade 3, his parents decided to advance their studies and moved the family to the Philippines. His father was pursuing a PhD in theology; his mother was earning her first degree after years of teaching with just a teaching diploma. Those three years were rough. According to local records, they were the only Zimbabwean family legally registered in the country. Masuku and his brother were the only Africans in their international school. “This is before the internet,” he points out. “People just think Africa is one big jungle, or one big desert. People tease you about your skin, and they’re touching your hair. The weather is different, the food is different, everything’s different.”

Masuku remembers those years as the most traumatic three years of his childhood. But they also taught him something valuable: how to be the only one in the room and still function. When the family returned to Zimbabwe, Masuku finished his secondary education at a church school. That’s where his relationship with performance took root. He sang, led a choir, took music lessons, and regularly spoke at church activities. “Speaking publicly was a very big part of school life in that school. And I took to it very well.”

This is remarkable, considering Masuku was born with what he describes as “a debilitating speech impediment.”

For university, Masuku enrolled at Helderberg College in South Africa’s Western Cape to study business management, a compromise with his father, who had initially pushed for accounting. “If I had been left to my own devices, I would have studied either music, advertising, or marketing,” Masuku says. But his father had concerns about all three. Music? “You’ll never make a livelihood.” Advertising? It had a reputation for loose morals. Marketing? “The marketer never rests.” Accounting was Masuku’s worst subject in high school; it was the only C on his report card. Still, his father insisted on business studies.

Helderberg ran on the American credit system, which meant Masuku could supplement his required business courses with electives from other departments. “I was able to supplement the stuff I hated, which is the business stuff, with media evaluation, psychology, sociology, history of earth and life. I was able to take theology courses.” He befriended the media studies lecturers and would skip his own classes (with permission) to join their field trips. One trip to the South African Broadcasting Corporation changed everything. He got a few moments on air with a famous DJ, and something clicked.

“I [needed] to get into voiceover work. Somehow, I was going to make my way into radio and broadcasting.” He spent the rest of that visit collecting phone numbers, then called them all from the payphone back at his dormitory. Everyone said no, except for one receptionist who, just before hanging up, mentioned two agents starting their own agency. She thought they should hear him. “I told her, I will not leave this phone until you call me back,” Masuku recalls. She called back and made the introduction. They asked Masuku to come for an audition.

He scraped together money from his student job at Subway to record a demo tape, wrote his own scripts for fictional bank ads, and showed up with nothing but raw talent. They played the first seconds of his clips. He braced for rejection. “And then they’re like, all right, cool. We’ll work with you.”

His first voiceover job came a few months later.

By graduation, Masuku had a small voiceover portfolio and some TV presenting experience from a Christian station that had set up on campus. But his path after university wasn’t straight. He taught briefly at a private school that had promised to help with his work permit, but then changed its mind. Next, he talked his way into a job at a high-fashion brand, literally approaching the founders at an airport after recognising them from a university economics paper he’d written about their export success. That job got him a work permit and taught him about retail, brand management, and working with international partners. But when the relationship with his employers soured, no new job materialised.

“If you spoke to me, then I would have told you that I chose entrepreneurship, but that’s not true. I stumbled into it,” Masuku admits. “If I didn’t figure something out, I’d have to go back to Zimbabwe.” With Zimbabwe’s economy already declining, that wasn’t appealing. So he registered his company and started putting himself out there for freelance gigs. Eventually, he landed representation with one of Johannesburg’s top talent agencies.

His voiceover career took off. At its peak, he was doing three to six recording sessions per week and became one of the early voices of Showmax’s ads. He also landed a TV presenting gig for a business advice show that ran for four years. Then the show got cancelled abruptly. He assumed other opportunities would follow. “I felt like such a big deal. I thought there’d be a line out the door waiting to work with me. Nobody was waiting for me.”

Humbled, Masuku ended up volunteering at a new community radio station. That’s where DJ Ian Fraser lent him a broadcast-quality Sennheiser microphone and introduced him to NPR-style storytelling. Inspired, Masuku started creating his own 15-minute audio stories, mostly business case studies. He published them on SoundCloud, but they didn’t gain traction. After running out of money, he stopped.

Five years later, BBC Outlook editor Munazza Khan discovered those old podcasts and started asking colleagues if they knew who made them. One person she asked was Kim Chakanetsa, a Zimbabwean broadcaster at the BBC who already knew Masuku from his tech writing for BBC Africa.

When Masuku later travelled to London, Chakanetsa met him in the BBC lobby and gave him a full tour, introducing him to colleagues as someone they’d be working with—before he even signed any deal. Khan called shortly after and offered him work. Masuku spent roughly a year as a near-permanent freelancer for Outlook, which reaches up to 100 million listeners globally. One of his most memorable pieces was about a Syrian refugee love story that started with a resume.

Around this same period, Masuku was four years into building African Tech Roundup. It started as a podcast partnership with the late Tefo Mohapi, who ran iAfrican, a tech publication popular among ICT professionals. The pitch was simple: Mohapi would provide the audience and technical infrastructure; Masuku would handle the broadcasting. About 100 episodes in, consulting inquiries started coming, the first from a Dutch venture capital firm. As the platform’s ambitions grew, Mohapi grew uncomfortable with the expansion beyond podcasting. The partners split, and per their agreement, the property went entirely to Masuku. His second co-founder, Musa Kalenga, joined about a year later.

More than a decade later, African Tech Roundup continues. Masuku’s Spar experience shows up here: he’s interested in the intersection between Africa’s digital economy and what he calls the “real economy”, where people “work, play, subsist, build lives, raise families.” “There’s a lot of aspects of that [digital] economy that are also imaginary—projections of what people want the future to be, or what they want their valuation to be,” he explains.

Today, Masuku splits his time between what he calls “creator journalism” and independent consulting. His newest venture is Future in the Humanities, a digital publication linked to the University of the Witwatersrand’s Digital Humanities Chair, where he serves as both executive editor and strategic advisor.

As part of that role, he coaches academics to translate complex research into public-facing writing, connecting specialists with live newsrooms. Recently, he helped an AI governance expert publish an op-ed in Business Day, South Africa’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal.

Despite his apparent strategic thinking, Masuku resists taking credit for his career trajectory. He points back to that speech impediment that mysteriously disappeared, the chance encounters, the timing of opportunities. “I can’t sit here and say, I’m making it, I did it, no, I can’t do that,” he reflects. “I’m cooperating with providence and trying to steward the gifts and opportunities I’ve been given.”

1. The dawn of a new era

On Friday, March 20, we hosted our most important event yet. Over a hundred people joined us at the Mike Adenuga Centre, Ikoyi, for the second edition of Communiqué IRL Lagos.

We kicked things off with a rundown of all we’ve been up to in the last year—expanding our media products, taking our events to Nairobi and Johannesburg, and formally launching our advisory and intelligence business that has seen us work with Expertise France, Sporty Group, the National Council of Arts and Culture, and 885 Capital, among others.

That presentation was followed by a special moment of recognition, where we surprised one of our most active community members, Anita Okafor, with a gift.

Then we had a panel discussion, which I participated in with Fisayo Fosudo, one of Africa’s most influential YouTubers. Gloria Edukere, our chief of staff and advisory business lead, moderated the conversation, which revolved around “The Creator’s Lifecycle.” It was full of gems and practical insights for creators looking to build businesses and careers that last longer than fleeting virality. Ask anyone who attended, and they’ll say the same thing.

Among all these amazing moments, however, we announced something that we had been working on for the last year. We’d hinted at it a few times in the past, but never fully articulated it until now. It completely changes our company’s trajectory and signals our entry into a new phase. We are confident it will have a massive impact on the future of Africa’s media and creative industries. It will change how creators and creative entrepreneurs build their businesses, how investors think about capital deployment, and how policymakers approach regulatory work.

2. Hello world, meet Communiqué OS

In the nearly six years that we’ve been publishing this newsletter and covering the media and creative industries, we have dealt with the “data question” far too many times to ignore. We agreed with the diagnosis that there isn’t enough data in Africa’s creative economy for founders, investors, and policymakers to work with. But we also knew that we needed a sustainable solution—one that wasn’t merely project-based, that didn’t depend exclusively on grants and foreign actors, and that was tailored to fixing real problems rather than succumbing to wishful thinking. To get to that point, we first needed to know what the landscape looked like. The creative economy database we launched in March 2025 did that.

Over several months before launch, we gathered information on 1,000+ organisations, investors, and events shaping the industry across Africa. We then categorised this by sector: film and TV, media, creator economy, music, fashion, gaming, creative arts, and cultural heritage. Our goal was to make it easier for anyone to find the right people, companies, and resources to unlock opportunities across the continent. But we also made it clear that the database was the first step in a long journey. It was, for all intents and purposes, an MVP.

Now, we are taking the next step: housing that data on a platform that is perpetually useful to the people we are building for. This is where Communiqué OS comes in.

Join the Communiqué OS waitlist

Speak to enough media founders, and you get the sense that many of us think we can replicate Bloomberg’s success in our market contexts. I have alluded to this multiple times. Yes, I know that Bloomberg is successful because it is first a data and intelligence company before it is a media platform. But I have also argued that this doesn’t mean it is impossible to take some elements of that success and assess their relevance in different scenarios.

In Communiqué’s context, this means we must develop an intelligence + media play that is both true to our reality and strategically viable, and this requires us to first understand what kind of information people need (not just want). Then we must figure out how to efficiently and affordably collect that information without compromising the quality. Finally, we must design a monetisation model that aligns with our audience’s spending habits.

So, what does this OS look like?

3. The anatomy of our intelligence layer

Think of Communiqué OS as an autonomous guide built on verified, structured profiles of the companies, investors, events, and organisations shaping the creative economy across Africa. Over a thousand of them, across 54 markets, organised by sector and geography. This is the foundation on which everything else sits.

The next layer is intelligence. Raw data, on its own, doesn’t tell you what to do. It only gives you an idea of what exists. The intelligence layer tells you what it means. In our case, that is a Health Index that scores markets across revenue density, capital inflows, export reach, and the policy environment; a capital flow tracker that follows money and traction; and a policy monitor that keeps watch on the frameworks shaping the industry in real time.

Above that sits the Creators Hub: a resource centre built specifically for Africa’s creative professionals. The tools that have always existed but never in the same place — accelerator listings, studio directories, legal contract templates built for the realities of this continent, a funding database that covers everything from the Afreximbank’s billion-dollar Africa Film Fund to smaller, sector-specific grants. The kind of information that, until now, required knowing the right person in the right room.

And holding all of it together is content and matchmaking: the connective tissue. The sector reports, playbooks, and interviews that help you understand where the industry is headed, paired with a routing engine that connects the right founders with the right investors.

None of these layers works in isolation. The data feeds the intelligence. The intelligence informs the resources. The content contextualises all of it. And the matchmaking engine brings it to life. The point is that an operating system is not a feature. It is the environment in which everything else runs.

4. Why do this?

We want to make the creative economy easier to navigate, build within, and invest in—a natural extension of the work we’ve been doing for the last six years. Communiqué OS brings together the insights, resources, and playbooks from our essays under one roof. It is for the founders, creators, investors, policymakers, researchers, and media professionals who want to build businesses, invest in companies and ideas, understand where things are headed, and how to prepare for the future.

For a long time, the problem has not just been access to information, but access to structured and unified information. The kind that helps make high-quality decisions and gives clarity.

Of course, none of this works without a sustainable business model. From the beginning, we knew this could not be just a grant-funded experiment (we won’t say no to the right grants, though) or a one-off research initiative. It has to be a product people are willing to pay for because it delivers clear, consistent value. Our approach to monetisation reflects that.

Communiqué OS will not be a pure subscription platform. Instead, users will purchase credits and expend them only when needed. We believe this approach better aligns with our market reality and puts the onus of trust and utility on us.

5. And how do we get there?

Building the platform is one part of the challenge; gathering the data is the other. For years, the dominant narrative has been that Africa’s creative economy lacks data. But we have found that the issue is not always the absence of data. It is the absence of systems capable of consistently capturing, structuring, and updating it.

Much of the most valuable information in this industry does not reside in the public domain. It lives in people’s experiences, the decisions they make, and the patterns they notice before other people. That kind of insight is often difficult to capture with traditional methods.

We’ve seen that reports help, but they are static. By the time we publish them, parts of the story have already changed. Instead, we need something more dynamic, something that evolves as quickly as the industry itself.

This is why we are introducing the Communiqué Intelligence Panel, a curated group of professionals and consumers across the creative economy who will contribute to a continuous stream of insight about what is really happening on the ground.

Instead of waiting months to compile a report, we can now ask focused questions in real time. Instead of relying solely on external datasets, we can capture lived experience directly from the people who shape the industry and consume its products. Instead of publishing isolated snapshots, we can begin to track patterns over time.

The process is intentionally simple. People register their interest, tell us a bit about who they are and what parts of the ecosystem they understand best, and if selected, become part of the private research community. This way, we ensure that we are not just building Communiqué OS for the ecosystem, but alongside it.

Register your interest

One year ago, we launched a primitive database. One year later, that database has grown into something much bigger and more audacious. Who knows what it’ll be another year from today?

For now, however, we invite you to take the next step with us. Join the Communiqué OS waitlist and register your interest to be a part of our Intelligence Panel.

“At some point, I thought I was going to be one of the best African writers.”

Jennifer Ochieng says this without hesitation. It is a memory of a very specific kind of ambition, one that shaped how she saw the world long before she found her place in it. Today, she is one of the East African film industry’s most important figures. With Sinema Focus, she has built something that didn’t exist before. In doing so, she’s quietly become a custodian of African storytelling, shaping how stories are told, received, and remembered across East Africa.

However, this might not have been a possibility without an almost unreasonable appetite for stories since childhood. Growing up, storytelling was a huge part of Ochieng’s life. She took every opportunity to consume them, from books to soap operas. “I was also such a fan of television. In every Kenyan household, you will find kids gathered around, and even for shows that were not allowed to be watched in African households, for example, The Bold and the Beautiful. And I remember just hiding behind a couch to watch it.”

She soon began to write. Thanks to school assignments, she had to write in both English and Swahili, and she really enjoyed doing both. By the time she finished secondary school, she was editing the school’s student magazine.

With an interest already formed, she pursued a degree in Journalism and Communications at the university. While there, she ran the magazine and kept a blog, one she has since made private and insists will never see the light of day again. It was a poetry and television blog. The poetry, she says, is why the blog stays buried, but for the most part, it was a place for her to write reviews of local and international shows she watched. Game of Thrones got a great deal of her attention. So did the wave of Kenyan productions that began appearing on local screens in the late 2010s. In these years, films like Nairobi Half Life and a generation of local TV shows started displacing the steady diet of American and Mexican content that had defined her younger years.

That was when something clicked. “I started to see that you can translate what happens in books to [the] screen,” she says. It changed how she thought about storytelling. It wasn’t just about writing stories to be read. Those stories could be visual. So she started writing scripts. None of them got produced. But that wasn’t the point. What mattered was the instinct behind them; the belief that local stories deserved to be told, and told well. Still, even as that interest grew, she knew one thing clearly. She did not want a newsroom. “I didn’t want to be on TV reading the news,” she says. “I wanted to do something more interesting.” She had studied broadcast journalism mostly as a container for ambitions, but now those ambitions were spilling over.

After university, like many young graduates, she took on different kinds of work. SEO writing. Academic writing. Freelance gigs. Anything that paid. Her first proper job came at a small magazine serving expatriate communities in Nairobi. It was a small operation. She was both the writer and the editor.

Then came MultiChoice. It started as a three-month freelance gig covering for someone on maternity leave. But Ochieng stayed for three years. She worked as a communications specialist in the digital department, managing the DStv and GOtv digital presence across East African markets such as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, interviewing actors and musicians, and writing stories that brought content on those platforms to life. It was during this time that she worked for Coke Studio Africa.

From MultiChoice, she moved to Showmax, where she focused on publicity. And it was there, managing campaigns for one of the continent’s most ambitious streaming platforms, that her real education began. Her most vivid memory from that period is not a triumph but a trial: The Real Housewives of Nairobi, a show that she describes as “a monster,” a chaos of difficult personalities and relentless scandal management that she would not trade for anything. “It was one thing after another,” she says. “But I usually say it’s my best campaign.”

It was during her time at Showmax that she began to notice something that would change everything. As a publicist, she worked closely with journalists, sending out press releases, pitching stories, and following up. Over time, a pattern became clear. Many journalists would take the press release and publish it almost exactly as it was. “No context, no interrogation.” At the same time, the industry itself was growing. More films. More shows. More talent. But the coverage did not reflect that growth. It was thin, surface-level, and largely missing the bigger picture. “No one was contextualising the industry and providing in-depth, incisive coverage.”

There was another problem, too. Data. “There was no data,” she says. “Filmmakers were moving blind.” No reliable box office numbers. No benchmarks. No way for investors or creators to properly understand the market. From where she sat, the gap was obvious. And she was in a position to do something about it. Ochieng had something few journalists had: access. She was already inside the industry rooms. She knew the actors, the filmmakers, and the deal-makers. Her calls got returned. And she could write. So one day, she opened an Instagram page, an X (formerly Twitter) account, a Facebook page, and started sharing. That was the beginning of Sinema Focus.

The social media pages grew quickly. People were hungry for exactly what Ochieng was offering: informed, insider-adjacent coverage of an industry that had been talked about in broad strokes for too long. This demand grew so big that she knew the social media pages weren’t going to be enough. She needed a website.

“I think at some point along the way, I was like, this can be bigger than what it is. And then I started building the website in the back end. The social pages were still doing their thing. I got someone to help. I started building the website, shaping it the way I wanted to.”

As she was doing this, she also began recruiting writers, building a team to help her do the work she wanted. So while the website was being built, the team was writing stories.

By the time the Sinema Focus website officially went live in October 2023, it already had a body of work behind it. And from the beginning, the mission was clear. “You cannot build an industry by always being nice,” she says. “You have to interrogate it.” Sinema Focus would not just celebrate the industry. It would question it. Challenge it. Hold it accountable. At the same time, it would also do the other half of the work: spotlighting filmmakers, telling their stories properly, and giving them the depth of coverage they deserved.

As Sinema Focus grew, so did its ambition. In December 2024, Sinema Focus became part of something larger. Ochieng helped launch the African Film Press, an alliance of three film journalism platforms spanning the continent. Together with Nigerian-focused What Kept Me Up and pan-African-leaning Akoroko, the alliance is a coordinated, continent-wide infrastructure for serious African film journalism. They launched the AFP Critics Prize in 2024 at the Surreal 16 festival, with the intention of extending it to other festivals across the continent.

But Ochieng is clear-eyed about the longer road. West Africa and East Africa are now covered. Southern Africa, Francophone Africa, and North Africa remain. The work of truly mapping the continent’s film culture is only beginning.

There is another gap that preoccupies her just as much: data. As she said, East African filmmakers are “moving blind.” Box office tracking is minimal. Nobody is aggregating the numbers that would allow a filmmaker to benchmark their theatrical release, or an investor to assess the market with any confidence. The Kenya Film Commission is not collecting this data. The Kenya Film Classification Board is not doing it. So Sinema Focus intends to.

“If no one is going to do that work, then we’re here,” she says. The goal is to produce the kind of industry data that feeds back into Sinema Focus’s editorial arm, informs filmmakers’ decisions, and gives investors the baseline they currently lack. It is, she believes, the most important work the platform can do, not just reporting on the industry, but actively providing the infrastructure that makes a healthier industry possible.

In August 2024, Ochieng stepped away from her publicity role at Showmax to focus full-time on Sinema Focus. The platform is expanding its East African coverage, actively growing its presence in Uganda and Rwanda, and looking toward Tanzania and Ethiopia.

On a personal level, she has not abandoned the older dreams. The scripts are still in the notes app. She still wants to write them. But to do that, she needs time, and for now, Sinema Focus takes up all of it.

1. Flipping the year-end playbook

At the end of every year, most media platforms begin a familiar dance. They publish lists: best this of the year, most popular that of the year. These lists are editorial rituals designed to celebrate achievement, measure impact, and, in some cases, shape legacy. The format is predictable, almost ceremonial: a neat packaging of the past twelve months into digestible rankings of success.

But GST (pronounced ‘gist’) decided to do something different. At the end of 2025, the politics and civic engagement media platform released its “Worst Nigerians of the Year” ranking, an unflattering roll call that has become an annual tradition since its 2024 debut. The first edition focused largely on politicians and public office holders, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and former Inspector General of Police Kayode Egbetokun, reflecting the platform’s emphasis on governance and accountability.

But in 2025, the list evolved. It became broader, more culturally attuned, and arguably more provocative. Alongside political figures were names drawn from Nigeria’s entertainment and digital public sphere, among them Grammy Award-winning artist Burna Boy, cited for “assaulting a fan”, and social commentator Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan, criticised for his style of activism that “thrives on drama, visibility and opportunism rather than principle”. The Worst Nigerians list was controversial by design. But more importantly, it was instructive. And this is the essence of GST: an attempt to reimagine what media can do for young Nigerians, not just to inform or entertain, but to call out, mobilise, drive policy change, and shape public behaviour in real time.

2. Making politics cool again

If GST feels like a response to something broken, it is because it is. The 2015 general elections marked a turning point in Nigeria’s civic life. For perhaps the first time in decades, a large base of young Nigerians became politically engaged, mobilised by the promise of change and the possibility of unseating an incumbent government. The eventual victory of the opposition felt like proof that civic participation could translate into real outcomes. But the years that followed told a different story.

As the promised transformation failed to materialise, that early enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment. By 2017, a growing sense of apathy had set in, particularly among young people who had once been at the forefront of political conversations. Organisations like Yiaga Africa, trying to fix the problem, launched campaigns such as Not Too Young To Run, pushing for structural reforms to lower the age barrier to political participation and encourage younger candidates to contest for office. But Adewunmi Emoruwa, CEO and founder of Gatefield, approached the problem from a different angle. He asked: “What would it take to get young people to care again?” His answer was a media platform.

“We were going to try and make sure that the news is delivered in a very clear way using content creator approaches, tools from advertising and marketing, and behavioural science, to make politics really cool for people to follow,” Emoruwa said to Communiqué.

In 2017, GST began as Gatefield TV, a pop culture-focused YouTube channel with a sprinkle of politics. Its thesis was that politics could be made more engaging if embedded in the language of pop culture. The format leaned heavily on creator-style content: conversations, lifestyle segments, and social commentary. It worked, just not in the way they expected. Audiences came for the culture, but not necessarily for the politics. Over time, it became clear that the model risked drifting into the very thing it was trying to avoid: another lifestyle media brand competing for attention in an already crowded space. So Gatefield pulled back.

At the same time, the Nigerian media space was growing more repressive. Newsrooms were increasingly entangled with corporate and political interests, shaping not just what was reported, but how it was framed. For journalists who resisted, the consequences could be severe, ranging from imprisonment to harassment.

Gatefield had, up until that point, maintained an investigative journalism fund to support reporters carrying out accountability-driven work. But in 2020, during the End SARS protests, the Federal Government froze the fund. It was a pivotal moment. What had been a structural challenge became an existential one. For Emoruwa and his team at Gatefield, the implication was clear: if independent journalism could be constrained so directly, then relying solely on existing media institutions was no longer viable. They would have to build something they could control, both in philosophy and in execution.

“We said if every other organisation will be controlled, then we probably need to invest in the ecosystem of independent journalism, and then, secondly, we need to invest in something that we have control over; this platform will not be for sale to private or government actors,” Emoruwa said.

As a result, GST does not accept advertisements; its funding has come primarily from a grant by the National Endowment for Democracy, but in recent months, it has launched a crowdfunding campaign.

3. Building an advocacy media platform

The new GST was launched in 2022. This time, it returned to its politics and civic engagement roots. Instead of building around a central website as a distribution channel, GST was designed as a social-first media platform—native to the spaces where young Nigerians already spend their time. Its presence was built across platforms like X, Instagram, and YouTube, with no real dependence on a traditional website. GST recognised a structural shift in how content was being consumed. “One of the theses we had with GST is that people are not going to websites anymore,” Chiamaka Dike, GST’s former editor, said to Communiqué. “You’re getting less traction on your stories on websites. So instead of wasting time building a website, why don’t we just put everything on social media?”

But more important than where GST showed up was how it showed up. From the outset, the platform rejected one of journalism’s most enduring norms: strict neutrality. Instead of simply reporting events as they happened, GST made a deliberate decision to editorialise, to interpret, contextualise, and take positions. “We are not going to be strictly bound by the entire idea of objectivity. So we are going to editorialise from the start. We’re going to give people the truth,” Emoruwa said.

In practice, this means connecting policy decisions to lived realities, for example, showing how inflation figures translate into the cost of living, or how monopolies shape everyday consumption. It also means choosing not to “platform” political actors in ways that could enable misinformation or manipulation.

The result sits uneasily within traditional media definitions. GST operates like a media platform in its distribution, but like a movement in its intent, a hybrid model that blends journalism, advocacy, and community into a single system. Or, as Emoruwa puts it: “We think of ourselves as a news movement of sorts, but really, it is a sort of social justice community.”

Beyond just storytelling, the engine of the “GST news movement” is campaigning. Every piece of content is a potential trigger for action. Where a traditional newsroom might stop at publishing a headline, say, a proposed tax increase, GST goes further, interrogating the underlying implications, particularly where they intersect with rights, policy, or everyday life. Those insights are then translated into coordinated campaigns.

One example is the “Reject Tax Scam” campaign, where GST’s deeper reporting on tax provisions surfaced concerns that had previously gone unnoticed. What followed was not just coverage, but mobilisation, petitions, public debate, and direct government responses.

The pattern is consistent: story → campaign → pressure → response.

In this model, journalism is the starting point of a process designed to convert attention into action, and, ultimately, into change.

What Gatefield has built with GST is an attempt to redesign the relationship between information and participation. In a landscape where attention is fragmented and trust in institutions is low, GST is betting that the future of civic engagement will not be driven by access to information alone but by the ability to translate that information into coordinated action.

That model, however, comes with trade-offs. By choosing to editorialise, to campaign, and to take positions, GST departs from the conventions of traditional journalism and steps into a more contested space, one where influence, advocacy, and accountability intersect. But this is precisely where GST’s advantage lies. In a media system which largely focuses on documenting events, its decision to take positions enables it to convert attention into pressure, and pressure into outcomes.

In the end, GST is asking a different question of the media in Nigeria: not just what people need to know, but what can they be moved to do?

“Every time people ask me, how did you start Noisy Streetss? I wish I had a more serious answer. But it started because of a boy band.”

Modupe Daramola is the CEO and founder of Noisy Streetss, a genuinely unusual organism in the African literary ecosystem. It is part publisher, part agency, part cultural lab. Its latest imprint, Ponmo is a Bird That Has No Place in a Cultured Culinary Sky & Other Stories, carries a title so audacious that it immediately raises a question: what kind of publisher would name a book like this? The answer lies in the unlikely way the company itself came into existence.

Much of Daramola’s story begins in Abeokuta, Ogun State, a city long associated with Nigeria’s literary and artistic tradition. But the deeper influence came from inside her home. Her mother, an obsessive reader, with shelves packed with romance and literary fiction, from Jane Austen to Nora Roberts. “My goal was to have as many books as my mom had,” Daramola recalls. “[She] had thousands of books in her room. She was constantly reading.”

Watching her mother disappear into novels taught her the pleasure of reading at an early age. But another influence helped turn that love into creative ambition: the novelist Yejide Kilanko, Daramola’s godmother and a close friend of her mother. Kilanko’s presence made writing feel real and attainable. Daramola likes to claim that one of the characters in Kilanko’s novel Daughters Who Walk This Path was named after her.

If her mother cultivated her love of books, Kilanko showed her that creating them was possible. By the age of twelve, Daramola had written her first manuscript and sent it to Kilanko for feedback. Another manuscript followed, then another. “I was constantly creating when I was a child,” she says. Yet the books she grew up reading were overwhelmingly Western. She attended a school with a British curriculum and spent much of her formative years immersed in European and American literary canons. African stories were largely absent.

Her parents, like so many Nigerian families before them, looked at a daughter who read a lot, argued, and wrote, and reached the logical conclusion that she should study Law. She didn’t resist. “Even though I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t think it would ever be something I’d ever do in my life. I thought I would just be like my auntie [godmother, Kilanko], in that I write a couple of books, but my main job is actually to be a lawyer.”

She enrolled at Durham University in the United Kingdom, where she planned to pursue a career in human rights and access to justice. Writing, however, refused to disappear. During her first year, she started a blog where she wrote legal commentary on trending issues alongside broader cultural observations. She was also surrounded by a circle of poets and writers who contributed to anthologies and literary projects. In retrospect, she was already living in a literary world; she simply hadn’t accepted it yet. Then the pandemic arrived in 2020.

Daramola had planned to move to London after she graduated and become a barrister. Instead, she was trapped in her apartment with nothing to do but surf the internet. It was during this time that she fell into a YouTube rabbit hole and emerged as an “Army,” a devotee of the Korean boy band BTS.

The band’s leader, Kim Namjoon, is well known for being a reader and an art-inclined person. If she ever met him, she reasoned, she needed something impressive to show for herself. So she gathered her friends on a call and posed the question: What talent could she develop quickly enough to impress a K-pop star? After ruling out singing and photography, a friend reminded her of the old blog. At the time, she wasn’t actively running it. She stopped in her final year on campus to focus on schoolwork.

“One day, what if he reads your blog and reaches out: I love your writing, let’s be together?” the friend said. And so, in December 2020, she relaunched the blog—renamed Noisy Streetss to impress Kim Namjoon.

She laughs as she tells the story now. But she also insists on its importance. “I did not have a deep motivator,” she says. “It was because I liked a boy.” What matters, she argues, is whether the thing you start takes on a life beyond its origin. Noisy Streetss did. Not long after relaunching, Daramola moved back to Nigeria for law school at her parents’ insistence, but kept running the blog, writing social commentary, film and music reviews, and posting occasional photography.

When the law school workload made it impossible for her to write on her own, and she didn’t want to quit the blog because of the Namjoon dream, she opened the blog to other writers. “I invited writers to submit stories to a thing called Love in the New Millennium. They weren’t even paid. All were volunteers, because I didn’t have any money.” That was the first-ever call for submissions on Noisy Streetss.

After completing law school, Daramola faced another crossroads. Her parents wanted her to return to the UK for a master’s degree. Reluctantly, she negotiated for more time in Nigeria. During that period, she joined the legal counsel’s office at Chapel Hill Denham, one of Nigeria’s leading investment firms, initially as an intern. She was later offered a role on the company’s finance team. The move to finance was a bid to buy more time. “I had started to enjoy Lagos and the work I was doing with Noisy Streetss, but I didn’t fully understand yet how big it could become.”

Meanwhile, the platform was evolving. Living in Lagos forced Daramola to rethink the direction of Noisy Streetss. Her original plan had been to build a UK-focused publication, partly because she believed it would offer quicker credibility and easier access to audiences. But being back in Nigeria changed her perspective. She began to notice how few platforms existed where young Nigerians could publish essays, stories or commentary without conforming to established expectations about what African writing should look like.

One early experiment was inspired by the popular podcast Modern Love, which features personal essays about relationships. Daramola wondered why there was no equivalent centred on African experiences. The result was Love Boat, a podcast telling African love stories.

Gradually, Noisy Streetss moved from being a Western-facing blog to a platform dedicated to Nigerian and eventually African voices.

Another turning point arrived in late 2021 during Lagos’s annual end-of-year cultural explosion known as Detty December. Watching the wave of concerts, parties, art shows and social gatherings unfold, Daramola felt a growing sense of urgency. “This thing happening in front of me is a cultural phenomenon,” she remembers thinking. “How do we archive it?” She put out a call for love stories set during that season. The submissions became the Love in Detty December anthology. The latest book, Ponmo is a Bird That Has No Place in a Cultured Culinary Sky & Other Stories, collects some of the strongest pieces from the series’s first three editions.

The move into publishing happened almost accidentally. During an editorial meeting, one of the Noisy Streetss editors expressed excitement about a group of submissions and wondered aloud whether they could become a book. Daramola paused.“What’s the hurdle?” she asked herself.

She began learning how publishing works, experimenting with digital tools, and researching practical steps, such as obtaining an ISBN. One article explaining the process helped demystify it enough for her to try. Soon after, Noisy Streetss released its first print anthology, A Man and a Woman and Other Stories.

Each project strengthened Daramola’s conviction that the venture deserved her full attention.

“My heart had grown so much to accommodate Noisy Streetss,” she says. “It went beyond doing something for Kim Namjoon and BTS. It became something I wanted to give to other people.”

In late 2022, she decided to focus on the venture full-time. The decision was met with some opposition from her parents, but they have gradually become supportive.

In December 2024, she formally registered Noisy Streetss as a publishing company. Her legal and finance training, which she once viewed as detours, had become unexpectedly useful. “Everything came together,” she says. “That’s why I always say you eventually get your way, by the grace of God.” Today, the company deliberately seeks out stories that challenge narrow definitions of African storytelling. Its catalogue includes fiction, essays and poetry that explore contemporary life in ways that feel fresh, strange or unapologetically specific.

Daramola insists that the goal is not to make African stories legible to Western audiences. Instead, the focus is on writing for Africans first. She often points to Korean film and television as an example. Those industries rarely dilute their cultural specificity for international viewers, yet their work travels globally. “People love K-dramas because they’re authentic. They’re not trying to explain themselves to anybody.” That is the future she imagines for Noisy Streetss: stories rooted so deeply in African realities that their specificity becomes their universal appeal.

Daramola still listens to BTS. Kim Namjoon remains her favourite member of the group. But what began as a fan’s playful motivation has evolved into something much larger, a restless drive to publish, amplify and circulate African stories wherever readers might be found.

The boy band, it turns out, was simply the door. The work on the other side had been waiting for her all along.

1. The creator studio gold rush

In November 2025, creative entrepreneur Ibidunni Oladayo opened The Content Lab, a 500-square-metre production facility designed for digital creators. Located in Ikeja, Lagos, the studio space includes three production studios, editing suites, a make-up studio, and other supporting facilities designed to streamline the production of professional digital content.

Oladayo is not the only one building infrastructure for creators. In February last year, documentary photographer and filmmaker Damilola Onafuwa opened Aroba Hub, a content studio and creative co-working space designed to serve photographers, filmmakers, and digital creators looking for a dedicated production environment.

Across Nigeria, similar facilities are appearing in major cities. From Lagos to Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Benin City, creator studios are quietly springing up, offering production spaces, equipment, and support services to a fast-growing population of digital creators. For YouTubers, podcasters, influencers, photographers, and filmmakers, these studios promise something that has historically been scarce in the creator economy: reliable places to produce high-quality content.

Demand for these creator studios is rising so quickly that some operators are beginning to specialise in only one part of the production process rather than building full-service facilities.

In October last year, Bright Eyes Editing Studio opened in Lekki, Lagos. Unlike broader studios that offer shooting spaces and production services, Bright Eyes focuses almost entirely on the final stages of the content pipeline—editing, colour grading, and finishing services for filmmakers, YouTubers, and digital media producers.

The emergence of specialised facilities like this is a sign of how quickly the creator economy is maturing. As more creators move from casual production to professional output, different parts of the value chain, from filming to editing to distribution, are beginning to support their own dedicated businesses.

What is emerging is an ecosystem of creator infrastructure providers: studios to shoot in, editing houses to finish content, and collaborative spaces where creators can work, meet, and experiment. Together, they form the early outlines of a physical production layer for Nigeria’s growing creator economy.

2. Counting the cost of creation

To be a part of the growing ecosystem of creator studios, you must first determine how big you want to go. The size you choose affects everything—rent, budget, and the kinds of clients and creators you can serve.

You can build a small creator studio inside a studio apartment. It will have only one set, for example, a podcast table, an interview corner, or a simple YouTube setup. Because the space is small, the equipment requirements are limited. One camera, basic lighting, microphones, and simple furniture are enough to get started.

The camera is where things get interesting. The most popular video camera used in content studios today is the Sony FX3, which sells for about ₦5 million ($3,570). “The FX3 is the cheapest Netflix-approved camera, making it attractive for creators who want high-quality video at a low price,” Tito Nwachokor, creative director at Mastermind Studios, told Communiqué.

For operators seeking slightly better camera quality, the Sony FX6 is another option, priced at around ₦9 million ($6,440). Lenses are another cost to consider. Basic lenses may cost between ₦500,000 and ₦1 million, while higher-end lenses like Sony’s G Master can cost as much as ₦3 million.

Audio equipment is equally important. A typical setup includes podcast microphones, wireless microphones for interviews, and an audio mixer. A Rode PodMic can cost around ₦300,000 ($214), while higher-end microphones like the Shure podcast mic can reach ₦700,000 ($500). Many studios also use the Rodecaster Duo mixer, which sells for about ₦1 million. Wireless microphones used for vox pops or mobile recording can cost as little as ₦200,000.

As studios grow, the highest costs tend to shift towards lighting, furniture, and set design. A mid-size studio, usually located in a two- or three-bedroom apartment, can support two or three sets. This allows creators to shoot different formats in the same facility: for example, a podcast set, a talk-show set, and a photography backdrop. Larger studios operate at a completely different scale. Instead of apartments, many operators rent whole buildings or warehouses and build multiple sets inside them. This strategy allows several productions to run simultaneously.

Power is another major consideration in Nigeria. Small studios may rely on a small petrol generator, which can cost around ₦600,000. Larger facilities often need multiple solutions, including solar and inverter systems, and diesel generators. Combined, these can cost between ₦10 million ($7,150) and ₦15 million ($10,730) upfront.

Post-production equipment is also necessary. Laptops, editing software, and hard drives are essential. Many studios rely on MacBooks, editing systems, and external storage drives. A single 4-terabyte hard drive can cost as much as ₦450,000 for a small studio, while a 20-terabyte hard drive setup can cost ₦2–3 million if the studio needs large storage capacity for video files. The numbers above represent the cost of buying brand-new equipment. In practice, many studio owners buy fairly used equipment to reduce their start-up costs. Prices are also heavily influenced by exchange rates, since most cameras, lights, and audio gear are imported.

3. The creator studio revenue playbook

Given the massive capital investment required to launch, studios must generate revenue immediately. This revenue comes from a mix of sources, including photography shoots, videography shoots, and podcast recording sessions. Studios also earn money by renting out cameras, lighting kits, and microphones. Some studios host small, intimate events such as private screenings, workshops, masterclasses, creator meet-ups, and training sessions. Over time, these multiple revenue streams allow the operators to keep their spaces busy throughout the week.

The size—and to some extent the location—are the primary determinants of the cost of renting these studios. A small studio with one set might charge around ₦20,000 per hour for studio time. A mid-size studio, with two or three sets, can charge between ₦30,000 and ₦65,000 per hour. Larger studios, especially those built inside warehouses with multiple sets, command higher prices. These facilities typically charge between ₦70,000 and ₦100,000 per hour, especially for commercial productions, brand shoots, or music video shoots.

Beyond hourly rentals, some studio operators are experimenting with membership models. For instance, Eko Creative Hub, with four locations in Lagos, has introduced a two-tiered creator membership programme for frequent users of the space. These memberships allow creators to pay a recurring monthly fee in exchange for discounted studio access, priority booking slots, and a set number of recording hours each month. In some cases, members also gain access to editing suites, community events, training sessions, and collaboration opportunities with other creators using the facility.

For creators, the membership model reduces the cost of repeatedly booking studio time. For studio operators, it creates predictable, recurring revenue, which can be difficult to achieve in a business built around hourly rentals.

4. The economics of creator infrastructure

What is happening with the trend of new creator studios emerging is not unique. Economists have spent decades trying to explain how industries grow from scattered individual activity into organised, self-sustaining ecosystems. The story of Nigeria’s creator economy fits their models closely enough to be instructive.

The starting point is the Linkage Theory developed by the economist Albert Hirschman in the 1950s. Hirschman argued that certain investments do not just support economic activity; they induce it. When infrastructure is in place, previously unviable activities suddenly become possible. A creator who cannot afford to own professional equipment can now rent studio time. A filmmaker who lacked post-production facilities can now outsource the process. The infrastructure does not follow the industry; it calls it into existence. In Hirschman’s language, every studio that opens in Lagos creates forward linkages: it enables the next layer of creative output that would not otherwise occur.

But infrastructure alone does not explain what comes next. As the creator economy has grown, something more interesting has begun to happen: the production process is splitting into distinct stages. What was once a single, messy, do-it-yourself chain—shoot, edit, grade, distribute—now begins to split into distinct, specialised businesses. Studios focused only on shooting, editing houses focused only on finishing, and equipment rental outfits supplying cameras, lights and other production gear.. This kind of decomposition has a name in business theory: modularity. The economists Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark showed that as industries mature, they tend to break into interoperable components, each of which can be optimised independently. The emergence of a place like Bright Eyes Editing Studio in Lekki, focused entirely on editing and colour grading, is a sign that the Nigerian creator economy has crossed a threshold. It is mature enough to support specialisation.

And finally, there is the question of geography. These studios are not appearing randomly across Nigeria. They are concentrating in particular corridors across major cities, where creators, clients, and collaborators increasingly find each other. The economist Alfred Marshall, writing over a century ago, noticed that industries tend to cluster in specific places and that the clustering itself becomes an advantage. Skilled workers concentrate there. Knowledge moves between firms. Suppliers set up nearby. The cluster becomes more productive than the sum of its parts. What Marshall described in Victorian England’s manufacturing towns, you can now see taking shape in Lagos and other major cities across Nigeria: a geographic centre of gravity for content production, still forming but already pulling people and money towards it.

Taken together, these three dynamics— activity, specialisation deepening the production chain, and geography concentrating talent—suggest that the creator economy is not simply getting bigger but also becoming more structured. And that structural maturity tends to be self-reinforcing: the more developed the ecosystem, the easier it becomes for new creators to enter, which drives more demand for infrastructure, which attracts more investment, which deepens the specialisation further.

Once it starts, the cycle is hard to stop.

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“When I drafted contracts, there would be corrections. And I would feel a type of way about not knowing things. So after work, I would stay back and read through old contracts to see how things were done.”

Nky Ofeimun describes her early days as a rookie legal executive in EbonyLife’s legal department. At the time, she was still learning the ropes of entertainment law, trying to understand the complex contracts and agreements that shape the business of film and television.

Seven years later, she has become one of the leading legal and strategy operators working in Nigeria’s film industry. But the path to that position did not begin in a law office or a film studio. It began with stories.

Ofeimun grew up in Port Harcourt as the first child and first daughter in her family. Her mother was a doctor, and her father an accountant who later became a businessman. Their household placed a strong emphasis on education. At home, her parents organised spelling competitions for their children. It was partly an exercise in learning and a way to keep them engaged.

Even as a child, she had a natural flair for language. She liked to write and was known among her classmates for telling stories. Reading was also a big part of her early life. Like many Nigerian children of her generation, she spent hours reading the adventure stories of British author Enid Blyton. By the time she reached secondary school in Enugu, writing had already become part of her identity. She joined the press club and continued experimenting with short stories. Naturally, she began to imagine a future as a writer.

But Nigerian parents tend to prefer more predictable careers for their children. When the time came to choose a course of study, her parents encouraged her to consider something more practical. “My parents said, ‘You’re good at English, and you can always write stories. Maybe go study Law. There are lawyers who write.’”

So she chose Law and enrolled at the University of Benin. Ofeimun arrived at the university unsure of what kind of lawyer she wanted to become. So she leaned on what she already knew—writing.

Alongside a group of fellow law students, she helped create a blog called Legal Watchmen. The site was essentially an informal publication for law students to explore legal topics, campus issues, and ideas that interested them. At the same time, she found other outlets for her writing. During her time in law school, she began sending short fiction pieces to BellaNaija. Sometimes the site published them, sometimes they did not. But the process allowed her to keep her creative instincts alive while in school.

After graduating from the university and attending the Nigerian Law School, Ofeimun was still not sure what she wanted to do with her legal career. But clarity came when she attended a conference focused on entertainment law. The event brought together lawyers, music executives, and media companies working within Nigeria’s creative industries. For her, the conference was eye-opening.

Up until then, entertainment law had not seemed like a realistic career path. But at the conference, she encountered several law firms and professionals working in the space. One person stood out in particular: Tomi Edwards, who at the time headed EbonyLife’s legal department. “She was quite young. I didn’t realise this was like a career option. And here was someone within my age bracket doing it. She sounded really smart, and I decided this is what I want to do.” She decided to pursue Entertainment Law.

Around that time, she had already begun working with The Wedding Channel, a niche television platform focused on wedding-related content. Initially, the job had little to do with law. She had first encountered the company through an Instagram ad seeking writers. When she eventually joined, the work was closer to executive assistance: preparing presentations, supporting operations, and assisting the small team running the channel. But once she began focusing on entertainment law, the company started sending legal work her way. “They gave me contracts to draft,” she says. “That was really my first actual foray into entertainment law.” It would not be long before a much larger opportunity would appear.

In 2019, Ofeimun joined EbonyLife as a legal executive, working directly under Tomi Edwards, the lawyer she had admired at the entertainment law conference. At the time, EbonyLife was one of the most structured media companies in Nigeria. Founded by media mogul Mo Abudu, the company operated a television network, produced films and television series, and was beginning to form partnerships with international studios and streaming platforms. For a young lawyer trying to understand the industry, it was the perfect training ground.

The legal department handled everything from film production contracts and distribution deals to partnerships with international studios. It was also an opportune time as global streaming platforms were beginning to take a serious interest in Nigerian content. “Netflix came in with their own standards and how they had to do things, and you could see that there was a different level of experience that was required. And because a lot of these deals were confidential, and it was the first time anything like it was being done in Nigeria, there was really nobody you could ask. So it was a lot of reading and figuring out stuff.” The learning curve was steep. But Ofeimun approached it with the discipline she had developed early in her career.

Over the next four years, she worked on a wide range of projects, including Òlòtūré and Blood Sisters. EbonyLife partnered with global companies including Sony, Amazon, and Netflix. She also worked on the legal agreements that supported EbonyLife Place, the company’s entertainment complex in Lagos. By 2022, she had risen to become the head of legal.

But by then she was already thinking about what came next. The experience at EbonyLife had given Ofeimun deep exposure to the business of film and television. She had negotiated deals, worked with international partners and managed the legal framework behind major productions. But she wanted to move closer to the industry’s strategic and operational sides.

“As far as Ebony Life went, I kind of knew everything that there was to know [about] entertainment law. And I wanted to now kind of explore what it would be like on the operational side of things rather than just being in legal advisory.” So she left EbonyLife and joined Papaya Studios.

Papaya was a different kind of organisation. Instead of simply producing films, it also helped finance and develop them. That meant the team had to decide which projects deserved investment. And that required everyone, including the legal team, to participate in creative and strategic discussions. “Papaya was a very heads-together kind of space. Everyone had to participate in reviewing scripts, looking at what it would look like to produce and market a film before we funded it.” For Ofeimun, this was the operational exposure she had been looking for.

She also became involved with Circuits, a streaming platform connected to the Papaya ecosystem. She worked on preparing the platform for launch and eventually served as its project manager after it went live. The role broadened her understanding of how technology, distribution, and content intersect in the modern film industry.

After several years moving between legal, strategic, and operational roles, Ofeimun began asking a bigger question: what kind of infrastructure does the Nigerian film industry still need? Her answer to that question is Backlots, a company that provides production support services for filmmakers.

Backlot works across several areas of the filmmaking process. One of its core functions is business affairs, helping filmmakers structure deals, navigate contracts and manage the legal aspects of production, particularly when working with international partners. But the company also tackles another often overlooked area: marketing.

Ofeimun believes many Nigerian independent films struggle to travel globally, not because the stories are weak, but because the surrounding infrastructure, marketing strategy, and packaging often fail to present them effectively. Backlots, therefore, works on marketing strategy and other services designed to help films reach broader audiences.

Ofeimun also operates Cast Closet, a platform focused on wardrobe and costume support for film productions. Both ventures reflect the same underlying philosophy. “A lot of my creativity is expressed via film and the film infrastructure and the film industry. And so that finds expression across different platforms.”

Ofeimun’s career has followed an unusual arc. She began as a child who wanted to write stories. Law was initially the practical compromise. Yet, in a way, she has returned to storytelling, just from a different angle. Through entertainment law, she has found a way to remain close to the stories she once wanted to write while shaping the systems that enable them to be produced. And in Nigeria’s fast-evolving film industry, those systems are just as important as the stories themselves.

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1. Nollywood’s night in Toronto

The National Event Venue in Toronto is typically used for weddings, concerts and other community celebrations. But on January 17, it played host to a more unusual event: the Canadian premiere of Behind The Scenes, the latest cinema release from award-winning Nollywood producer Funke Akindele. That evening, the venue’s 700-seat auditorium transformed into a temporary Nigerian cinema. The crowd that gathered was a familiar cross-section of Toronto’s Nigerian diaspora, drawn by the chance to watch one of Nollywood’s biggest stars on the big screen, thousands of kilometres away from home.

Before Behind The Scenes arrived in Toronto, it had already fulfilled what has become the unwritten rule for every Funke Akindele cinema release: that it dethrones the previous Funke Akindele film to become the new number one on Nollywood’s all-time box office chart. This time, however, Behind The Scenes went further than the usual script, becoming the first film to cross the coveted ₦2 billion mark at the Nigerian box office. With the domestic run secured, the film began to travel, first to the UK, then to the US, and finally to Canada, where it grossed over $140,000 in a week.

The Canadian cinema run was made possible by a little-known distribution company called Snag Productions. Founded by two Nigerian immigrants based in Canada, the company is attempting to build a more deliberate pathway for African films into the North American cinema market. Their ambition is not simply to organise occasional screenings for diaspora audiences, but to create a distribution pipeline that allows Nollywood and other African and Black films to circulate more regularly in Canadian cinemas.

2. The international distribution bottleneck

Nigerian films have historically struggled to crack the international cinema market. When Nollywood films travel abroad, their theatrical runs are usually limited and geographically predictable. The UK has become the most reliable overseas destination, largely because of its large Nigerian diaspora and established African film audiences. But outside the UK, the path is less certain. In North America, especially, Nigerian films have rarely secured consistent theatrical distribution. Most screenings happen as one-off diaspora events organised by community groups, rather than as part of a structured distribution strategy. The result is that even Nollywood’s biggest box office hits often struggle to find sustained audiences beyond Nigeria and the UK.

The difficulty of exporting Nollywood films to international cinemas is not simply a matter of ambition, but also of the structural realities of the markets these films seek to enter. Demography, for instance, is a major constraint. In Canada, the potential audience for Nigerian films is still relatively small. According to estimates from the 2021 national census, about 80,000 Canadian immigrants were born in Nigeria. When you expand the bracket to include people of West African heritage, it rises to around 150,000. Even assuming rapid growth since then, the figure likely remains below 400,000 people in a country of more than 30 million. In practical terms, this means the core diaspora audience that typically drives demand for Nollywood abroad represents less than one per cent of the Canadian population. By comparison, the Indian population in Canada is about 1.6 million, and the larger South Asian community stands at 2.6 million, or roughly seven per cent of the population. This helps explain why Indian films such as Dhurandhar have been able to sustain longer theatrical runs, grossing $7 million in Canada.

Another constraint is the structure of the cinema market itself. Canada has about 3,000 cinema screens across roughly 700 locations. But many of these venues operate relatively small multiplexes with limited screens. Screening slots for films are heavily contested. Hollywood releases dominate the schedule, followed by British films, Canadian independent productions, Asian films, and the globally established Bollywood industry. Even within the broader category of Black cinema, films from the United States and Canada tend to take precedence. By the time African films enter the equation, they are competing for a very small portion of an already crowded cinema schedule. This congestion means that even when a Nollywood film secures a theatrical release, sustaining it for several weeks can be difficult. Cinema operators constantly rotate films based on ticket sales, and a movie that cannot demonstrate consistent demand quickly loses its screening slots.

Finally, Nollywood’s international audience remains narrow. Most demand still comes from Nigerians in the diaspora, with limited uptake from Caribbean audiences or Black viewers born and raised in North America. Until Nollywood expands beyond that core demographic, its international theatrical footprint will remain small.

3. Cracking Canada’s cinema market

Snag Productions was created to address this problem in Canada. The company was founded by Damola Layonu and his wife, Chiagoziem Obi, both of whom previously worked at Filmhouse Group in Nigeria. It was there that Layonu first built his experience in film distribution before the couple emigrated to Canada.

Once they arrived, the absence of African content in Canadian cinemas became difficult to ignore. Despite the size and visibility of African communities in cities such as Toronto, Nollywood films were largely absent from the country’s cinema screens. “We were asking ourselves, why can’t we have Nollywood films running and performing well in Canadian cinemas? People say black people don’t go to cinemas, is that a fact? We wanted to find out,” Layonu said to Communiqué.

That question eventually became the foundation for Snag Productions. The company was incorporated in 2022 to build a distribution pathway for African films into the Canadian cinema market. However, it did not hold a screening until two years later, after securing a distribution licence with FilmOne, Layonu’s former employer.

Its first release was Farmer’s Bride, followed by a steady stream of Nollywood titles that helped test the market’s viability. Rather than attempting long theatrical runs immediately, Snag’s strategy has been deliberately cautious. Films are typically released over a weekend first. If ticket sales exceed expectations, the screening window is then extended into a full week. The idea is to demonstrate, through actual ticket sales, that there is a viable audience for Nollywood films in Canadian cinemas.

The company has also begun to think more strategically about the release calendar. Certain kinds of films already dominate at specific times of the year. The December-to-January holiday window, for instance, has become closely associated with blockbuster releases from producers such as Funke Akindele and Toyin Abraham. Valentine’s season has also emerged as a reliable window for romantic films. Actor and producer Timini Egbuson has begun to corner that period with releases such as Reel Love in 2025 and Love Notes in 2026. Snag Productions aims to secure distribution deals with filmmakers during these periods.

Beyond programming strategy, Snag has also begun building partnerships within the Canadian exhibition ecosystem. The company has struck a distribution agreement with Landmark Cinemas, the second-largest cinema chain in Canada, allowing Nollywood titles to screen across multiple locations. In cities where Landmark does not operate, such as Toronto, Snag has relied on Fusion Intelligence’s Convoy distribution platform to stream films to non-cinema locations. Convoy was used during the Canadian run of Behind The Scenes.

Finally, the company is also thinking about the longer-term challenge of content appeal. While diaspora audiences remain the core market for Nollywood abroad, Snag is exploring ways to broaden that reach. As part of that effort, it has partnered with Weaned Child Productions, a studio founded by novelist Umar Turaki, to develop and distribute original content designed to travel more easily with Canadian audiences.

For now, Snag Productions’ strategy is still in its early stages. But the first results suggest that the experiment may be working. When Behind The Scenes sold more than 8,000 tickets, it generated over $140,000 in box office revenue. Toyin Abraham’s Oversabi Aunty also found an audience, selling roughly 4,000 tickets and grossing more than $70,000 during its run.

By Hollywood standards, these figures are modest. But for Nollywood in North America, they represent proof that a consistent audience exists and can be mobilised when films are properly distributed.

Timing is also favourable. Nigerian migration to Canada has accelerated over the past decade, with Nollywood already functioning as an important cultural touchpoint for diaspora communities. As more Nigerians choose Canada and other North American destinations as their preferred migration routes, the audience base that supports these screenings is likely to expand.

For Snag Productions, the long-term ambition is not simply to organise occasional screenings for homesick audiences. It is to normalise the presence of African films within the cinema ecosystem, moving them from sporadic diaspora events into something closer to a regular feature of the North American cinema calendar.

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