In a few weeks, Communiqué will make its first official stop in Kigali for the Africa Creative Economy & Investment Forum (ACEIF) 2026, taking place August 23–30th, 2026, in Kigali, Rwanda. We are partnering with Africa in Colors to design a series of conversations at this year’s forum, including the first edition of Communiqué IRL Kigali.

Across Africa, creative and cultural industries are becoming increasingly influential, shaping business policies, driving tourism, creating jobs, and redefining how people worldwide perceive the continent. Underneath all this, one important question lingers: How do we transform cultural influence into investable, scalable businesses?

As a media and intelligence company focused on Africa’s creative economy, we believe the next chapter for the continent isn’t just about creating more content—it’s about building stronger businesses, better infrastructure, deeper collaboration, and pathways for long-term investment.

Secure your slot

As part of the partnership, Communiqué will:

• Facilitate a workshop led by our Founder & CEO, David I. Adeleke, on product thinking, monetisation, and building creator-led businesses beyond brand partnerships.

• Co-host Communiqué IRL Kigali, an official ACEIF side event exploring “How to Build Investable Creative Enterprises in Africa.”

The networking mixer will bring together creators, founders, investors, policymakers, ecosystem builders, and cultural leaders for an evening of thoughtful conversation on the future of Africa’s creative economy—covering investment readiness, infrastructure building, and pan-African collaboration.

If you’ll be in Kigali during ACEIF, we’d love you to join us. Get your tickets here.

1. Setting the stage

This July, I Said What I Said, one of Africa’s most popular podcasts, hosted by Jola Ayeye and Feyikemi “FK” Abudu, will begin its largest international tour yet. The show will make stops in 12 cities across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Seven new cities have been added to the tour, up from the five it visited last year.

The expansion offers a glimpse into what I Said What I Said has become. Launched in 2017, the podcast began as a series of candid conversations about life, relationships and popular culture. It has since grown into one of Nigeria’s most recognisable talk shows, with an audience that stretches beyond the country and a business that now extends beyond recorded episodes.

I Said What I Said is not alone. Across Nigeria, successful podcasts are beginning to operate as multimedia businesses rather than standalone audio programmes. They publish full video episodes on YouTube, cut recordings into clips for social media, work with advertisers, and organise ticketed events. But each new format also introduces new costs. A podcast that once required microphones, a producer, and a sound engineer may now need a studio, cameras, lighting, video editors, social media producers, and an events team. Touring adds venues, travel, accommodation, technical production, and marketing to the bill.

As Nigerian podcasts evolve into full multimedia businesses, how much does it actually cost to produce one? And what does it take to build a sustainable business around a podcast?

You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward.

Become a member.

2. Counting the cost

Not everyone will achieve success on the scale of I Said What I Said. Podcasting still has an unusually low barrier to entry. Anyone with a smartphone and a quiet room can record a conversation, publish it online, and call it a podcast without spending anything. That simplicity has produced an abundance of shows. Spotify now hosts about 100,000 African podcasts.

Most podcasts begin as audio-only productions and, despite the growth of video, audio remains the format’s foundation. Media companies also continue to invest in it. Last year, Culture Custodian launched Carnivores, a narrative podcast about the rivalries and public disputes that have shaped Nigerian popular culture. Earlier this month, technology newsletter Notadeepdive launched Africa Built, which traces the development of some of Africa’s most important technology companies.

But the moment a producer decides to professionalise a podcast, the costs begin to accumulate. For a one-hour audio episode, a sound engineer can charge between ₦80,000 ($58) and ₦150,000 ($109), depending on experience and production complexity. That work can include supervising the recording, cleaning the audio, mixing voices, and adding music or effects. A heavily produced narrative show will usually cost more than a loose conversation between two hosts.

A scripted programme also needs a writer. An experienced podcast scriptwriter can charge between ₦80,000 ($58) and ₦200,000 ($158) per episode. Finding one is not always easy. Nigeria has a large pool of screenwriters and journalists, but relatively few writers have been trained to write for the ear, where pacing, transitions, and sound must carry the story. “Scripting podcasts in Nigeria is so difficult because people are not used to scripted podcasts. There’s this idea that to make a podcast, you just need to get behind the mic and discuss the topic of the day,” Adetoun Samiat, Culture Custodian’s head of storytelling, told Communiqué. Consequently, many scripted podcast productions absorb the cost of writing, with the host and producer taking on the work themselves.

Increasingly, however, audio is only the starting point. The reasoning is commercial. Audiences and platforms have shifted towards watching rather than just listening, and YouTube is now one of the largest homes for podcasts. A camera also turns one recording into several products: a full episode for YouTube, and short clips that travel across Instagram, TikTok and X. Those clips have become the main way new listeners find news shows, which makes video the cheapest marketing tool for podcasting.

Video pays in another way, too. It gives advertisers something to buy that audio cannot. “Video podcasts attract more investors because now there are visuals,” Ayo Lawal, former creative director at Eggcorn Digital, told Communiqué. “You can brand the cup, brand the mic, you can brand the picture frame hanging on the wall.” Every surface in the shot becomes inventory a sponsor can pay to occupy.

This does not mean audio-only podcasts cannot make money. Video may widen the commercial opportunity, but a distinctive audience can still make audio pay. In 2022, I Like Girls, a narrative audio podcast that entered the top 10 documentary podcasts in Africa, secured a combined ₦10 million ($22,831; at a 2022 exchange rate of ₦438.1 to $1) in sponsorship from PiggyVest and Paystack. The funding allowed the production to break even, with a significant portion used to stage a listening event.

With video, the trade-off is cost. A show that once needed only microphones, a producer, and a sound engineer now needs a studio, cameras, lighting, video editors, and social media producers. A podcast company can bring video production in-house by building its own studio. This requires a significant upfront investment in cameras, microphones, lighting, furniture, editing equipment and power. But the studio can eventually become a profit centre if it is leased to other podcasters and creators when not in use. For a fuller breakdown of those economics, read Communiqué 108.

Most podcasts, however, outsource production. Recording and editing a one-hour video episode typically costs between ₦250,000 ($181) and ₦400,000 ($290). Producers can lower the average cost by recording several episodes in one day. A full-day booking, during which four to six one-hour episodes are filmed, costs between ₦1 million ($725) and ₦1.5 million ($1,087.5). This spreads the cost of production across more episodes.

3. The long road to profitability

Once an episode is finished, it must be distributed. Hosting services such as Acast and Afripods provide the RSS feed through which an audio show reaches Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Hosting and distribution can add roughly $10 to $30 per month to costs, depending on the service and plan.

Distribution alone does not guarantee discovery. Producers increasingly pay clippers to extract moments from an episode and publish them on TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube Shorts. These clips are designed to travel further than the full episode and direct viewers back to it.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

After accumulating these costs, producers need to recoup their investment. Most do not. A polished set and clean footage may make a podcast look successful long before it becomes commercially viable. Typically, the first season is self-financed by the producer as a proof of concept: evidence that the format works, that the hosts are compelling, and that there is an audience for the podcast. Producers can then take those results to advertisers before commissioning a second season. The exceptions that secure sponsorship in their debut season are shows whose hosts already have large online followings; those existing audiences are what brands are actually trying to reach. Brands back them immediately because the podcast’s audience already exists.

For podcasts that do scale, revenue comes from several sources. Industry estimates gathered by Communiqué suggest that a season sponsorship can range from ₦10 million ($7,250) to ₦70 million ($50,750), depending on the number of episodes, audience size, and engagement. Individual advertising placements can bring in ₦500,000 to ₦3.5 million, while paid guest appearances can cost between ₦1 million and ₦3.5 million. These figures are not fixed. Prices depend on the advertiser’s budget, its relationship with the podcast and what the package includes.

YouTube adds another layer. Revenue can range from about $100 to $2,000 per video, depending on views and viewers’ locations. Ticketed live shows and merchandise also provide revenue.

By the time a podcast reaches this stage, it is no longer really a podcast. It is a media business, and like any business, it survives by not depending on a single source of income. The recorded episode sits at the centre, but the revenue radiates outwards into video, sponsorship, merchandise and live shows.

“The podcast becomes the central IP for everything that you do, and depending on the strength of the IP, it communicates immense value to brands to sponsor your production. In that way, podcasts make more money,” Samiat told Communiqué.

That is the logic behind I Said What I Said’s 12-city tour. The episodes built the audience, and a business was built on top of that audience. The tour is just the latest thing the business can sell.

A Note From the Editor

From today, July 21, until September 1, 2026, we will be going on a publishing break. During this time, we will not be publishing new Flagship essays or Offscript profiles. Instead, we’ll take this time to rest and recharge, improve our content formats, and strengthen the publication for the busy second half of the year.

While we are away from your inbox, feel free to explore our archives and catch up on the essays and Offscript profiles (there have been very incredible ones like this one and this) you might have missed this year. You can also reach out to us to share what you want to understand about Africa’s media and creative industries.

Thank you for your continued support. See you soon!

“It was never part of my plan. I thought I was going to practise [law] all the days of my life.”

A twenty-something Ify Mogekwu could never have imagined that her love of food and the quiet pleasure she got from figuring out how to make it would one day become her life’s work. Today, she is the face behind Ify’s Kitchen, a food storytelling brand with 2.1 million Instagram followers, a combined 3.6 million followers across all major platforms, two YouTube shows, and a thriving digital store, with some products selling for as high as $750.

But she didn’t get there in a straight line. For nearly a decade, that path ran underneath a legal career.

Mogekwu was born in Lagos into a typical Nigerian household where education came first, and discipline was non-negotiable. She was an outspoken child who read everything she could get her hands on and expressed herself with unusual clarity. As a result, the adults around her had already decided that law suited her. She doesn’t remember if that was exactly what she wanted; she only remembers hearing it often enough that, by the time she left primary school, she believed it too. “There was no confusion,” she says. “I knew I was going to be a lawyer, and every part of my life just took me towards that step.”

She studied law at the University of Ibadan and attended the Nigerian Law School. After she was called to the bar and completed her mandatory National Youth Service year, she worked briefly at a private company before joining ACCAS, now Denton ACCAS, one of Nigeria’s most prominent law firms. She would stay for the better part of a decade. Law was familiar, respected, and secure. She expected to remain in it.

Running quietly beside her legal career, however, was another interest. Mogekwu had always loved food. From a young age, she was drawn to food television — MasterChef and Food Network. At university, where students had to fend for themselves, her food became something of a fixture for her roommates. Later, at work, colleagues came to her with the same question: “What should I cook tonight? What should I order?” She became, within her circle, the person you asked about food.

The first sign that this interest might amount to more came in 2013. Mogekwu was on leave when she heard a radio advert for Knorr Taste Quest, a televised cooking competition. For years, she had watched shows like MasterChef and wondered what it would feel like to be inside one of those kitchens. She applied almost immediately, even though she had no professional culinary training. She was selected from thousands of applicants and finished in the top three. The experience changed how people around her saw her relationship with food. “This is more than she just loves food,” she recalls people saying. “She’s onto something.”

You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward with as little as $5

Become a member.

Still, she returned to law. She did not yet see how cooking could replace her legal career. That began to change after a friend opened an Instagram account for her on New Year’s Eve in 2015. Mogekwu had resisted joining because she could not imagine what she would post. Once she looked around the platform and noticed people sharing their hobbies, the answer became obvious: she would share food. So she started posting food pictures. Nothing more than that, at first.

But as she studied Nigerian food content, she noticed that recipes were often presented as though one missed step could destroy everything. Mogekwu thought it was wrong. Cooking was not that hard. “I was going to demystify the art of cooking,” she says. She wanted to show that anyone could put a pan on the fire and make good food for themselves and their family.

One evening after work, she held her phone in one hand and filmed herself preparing dinner. The response was far bigger than she expected. Recipe videos were common on YouTube but still unusual in Nigeria’s Instagram sphere, and her simple approach found an audience. So she did it again—late nights, weekends, her kitchen as a set and her phone as a camera. At first, she outsourced the editing. Eventually, she learnt to do it herself.

The early growth was scrappy. She went around her office at ACCAS telling colleagues to open their phones and follow her right then and there. But as the videos found their footing, people started coming on their own. She remembers hitting 5,000 followers and being genuinely stunned, running to tell her husband, barely able to believe that strangers were choosing to follow her. “Five thousand people. Are they okay? Are they normal?”

The numbers were exciting, but the messages mattered more. People told her she had given them confidence in the kitchen. Some said her recipes had helped their marriages. Others used what they learned from her to start food businesses. Then the brand deals started coming.

Her first paid brand opportunity came through Dumchi Foods. When she was asked how much she would charge to create content with the company’s products, Mogekwu offered to do it for free. She genuinely didn’t know it was something people paid for. The client refused. Mogekwu’s time, energy and ideas deserved payment. That conversation was the first time Mogekwu understood that what she was building had real market value. After that, the offers kept coming.

Meanwhile, her responsibilities at the law firm kept growing. She tried to manage both careers. But as her audience grew, the arrangement became harder to sustain. The page required daily attention. Brand work, recipe development, and production were squeezed into whatever hours her law career left behind. Something had to give. She had known it for a while. “It was inevitable that I had to make a decision. You can’t give your 100% unless you’re focused. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and I didn’t make it lightly.”

What finally moved her was a combination of timing and a particular kind of fear — not fear of leaving, but fear of staying too long. The COVID pandemic had already prompted her firm to move to remote work. Then her twins were born, and she went on maternity leave. For the first time, there was enough distance from the firm’s daily rhythm to consider the life she was building outside it.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

Law was all she had ever known professionally, and she didn’t know how to walk away from it. But by the end of her leave, she understood that if she didn’t do it then, she probably never would. What tipped her over the edge, in the end, was imagining herself older and full of regret. “I just didn’t want to start thinking about what would have been. I’ve spent over a decade in the legal industry. Maybe it’s time to find out what would happen in the creator economy.”

Her family didn’t immediately understand. The creator economy in Nigeria was still finding its shape, and from the outside, what she was describing looked a lot like leaving a serious career to cook food online. She chose not to spend too much time arguing. “The vision was mine and mine to run with. I spent less time trying to explain to them than trying to prove to them that this will work.”

Leaving the salary behind forced a different kind of clarity. She had to treat what she had built as a business. She built systems, brought on a management team to handle negotiations, contracts and brand strategy, and freed herself to focus on being the talent. From there, she developed products: meal plans, online cookery classes, and personalised menus for restaurants. These weren’t ideas she had dreamed up alone; her audience had asked for them, and she listened.

Television followed. Producers approached her about creating Ify’s Kitchen for Multichoice, taking her work to audiences across Africa. She also produced two YouTube shows, Unfiltered & Extra Spicy and Food Therapy, which allowed her to move beyond the recipe format.

Those shows are her refusal to be reduced to one skill. “There’s a whole lot more to me,” she says. “I can be a host. I can do more. Don’t just put me in a box.” That is why Mogekwu prefers “food storyteller” to “food creator”. Recipes are the format, but African life is the larger subject: how people cook, eat, gather, and care for one another.

What she is building towards now is something that outlasts any single video: more products, more experiences, and a business with staying power. “I want to be remembered as someone who has helped redefine how African food is experienced, how it’s appreciated, and also celebrated both at home and around the world.”

1. Measuring the immeasurable

In June, the Music Economy Development Initiative (MEDI) launched a new online portal documenting the music industries of 55 countries, including every country in Africa. It is the first attempt to build a standardised, publicly accessible dataset that measures music not just as a cultural product, but as an economic sector.

Click on a country profile on the portal, and you will find information on everything from recorded music revenues to copyright legislation, collective management organisations, licensing frameworks, and broader economic indicators. Each profile is designed to determine whether the institutions needed to sustain a country’s music economy actually exist.

The first insights from the portal are striking. MEDI projects that, from 2027, Nigeria will fail to collect approximately $231.4 million in recorded music revenue every year, while Kenya will leave a further $54.6 million on the table. Together, almost $286 million generated by two of the continent’s most culturally influential music markets will never reach artists, songwriters, producers, and publishers.

The scale of that figure becomes even more remarkable when compared with the size of Africa’s music industry today. According to IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026, Sub-Saharan Africa’s entire recorded music market generated just $120 million in 2025. The region grew by an impressive 15.2%, making it the joint second-fastest-growing music market in the world; yet, it still accounted for less than 0.5% of global recorded music revenues. Nigeria’s projected uncollected revenue alone is almost twice the size of the continent’s current recorded music market.

Over the past decade, African music genres have become more popular globally. African artists headline arenas across Europe, North America, and Asia, dominating international streaming playlists and increasingly shaping the sound of popular music worldwide. Yet, while the music has travelled, the institutions that support it at home have struggled to keep pace.

That contradiction lies at the heart of MEDI’s work. Backed by the Centre for Music Ecosystem, Global Citizen, International Finance Corporation (IFC), and a coalition of industry and development partners, the initiative argues that Africa’s greatest music challenge is no longer producing talent, but building the copyright systems, licensing frameworks, collective management organisations, regulatory institutions and investment structures that allow countries to capture the full economic value of that talent.

You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward.

Become a member.

2. A $286-million-sized hole

MEDI’s headline-grabbing estimates of the Nigerian and Kenyan music industries are a measure of what the industries could be worth if the systems underpinning them worked as effectively as those in comparable markets.

To build the model, MEDI drew on six years of data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), and the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), covering 49 music markets. The initiative grouped countries with similar economic and demographic characteristics before applying a linear regression model to estimate how much recorded music revenue Nigeria and Kenya would generate under stronger institutional conditions.

“We essentially created one country made up of peer markets that mirrored Nigeria — based on population, income, size and other factors — and compared that model country against Nigeria,” Shain Shapiro, Executive Director of the Centre of Music Ecosystems, told Communiqué. The exercise was intended to answer a simple question: if countries with similar characteristics can collect significantly more value from music, what explains the gap?

Under that model, Nigeria’s unrealised opportunity totals $231.4 million annually. Around $136.3 million comes from neighbouring rights, the royalties owed to performers and producers when music is streamed, broadcast, played in public or sold physically, while another $95.1 million comes from songwriter and publisher collections. Kenya’s projected $54.6 million follows a similar split. MEDI describes the projections as deliberately conservative, assuming no dramatic economic growth, currency appreciation, or population shocks.

The obvious question is: where does all that money go?

Part of the answer lies in the economics of streaming. According to Spotify data, Nigerian artists received more than ₦60 billion in royalties in 2025 from over 30 billion streams. Yet, because streaming payouts are determined by local subscription prices, a million streams in Nigeria generate only a fraction of what the same audience would earn in markets such as Sweden or the United States. “You cannot expect the music industry to outperform the economic environment in which it operates. The output of any industry reflects the strength of the system behind it. The music industry doesn’t exist in a silo,” Afrobeats curator and media executive Melody Hassan told Communiqué.

This problem is largely a function of purchasing power and is unlikely to change without rising incomes and a larger base of paying subscribers.

The rest, however, never enters the system at all. Unlike streaming revenue, which flows through platforms such as Spotify and YouTube under direct licensing agreements, a significant portion of music income depends on collective management organisations (CMOs). These organisations license businesses such as broadcasters, hotels, and shopping malls to use copyrighted music, collect licence fees, and distribute royalties back to rights holders.

In Nigeria, however, that system has been shaped by years of institutional uncertainty. For much of the past decade, the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON) and the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria (MCSN) were locked in legal and regulatory disputes over who had the authority to license musical works and collect royalties. COSON, which had been approved as the country’s sole collecting society in 2010, later had its licence withdrawn amid governance disputes, while MCSN, after years of litigation, was eventually reinstated as an approved collective management organisation. The prolonged conflict created uncertainty across the industry. Businesses were often unsure whom to pay, rights holders questioned whether collections would reach them, and many simply chose not to participate in the system at all.

In the absence of a proper collection framework, direct licensing agreements between rights owners and large commercial entities, such as mobile network operators, already exist and generate significant income. But this system remains haphazard and fragmented.

“The system is very disjointed. As a result, there’s a lot of leakage, which creates an environment that is very difficult to invest in,” Shapiro said.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

3. Counting the cost

MEDI’s ambition extends far beyond improving royalty collection. At its core is a much more fundamental proposition: that music should be treated as a development sector. For decades, African governments have largely viewed music as a cultural product, a source of entertainment, national identity, and soft power. While that view is important, MEDI argues that this framing has obscured music’s economic significance.

If music is instead recognised as an industry, it becomes easier to justify investments in copyright enforcement, licensing systems, skills development and regulatory reform in much the same way governments invest in agriculture, manufacturing or tourism. “A lot of people do not see music as part of the economy,” Shapiro said. “For most people, music is what happens after work, not what happens during work.”

MEDI plans to extend the Nigeria and Kenya model into forecasts for every African market, each freely available through the portal. A comprehensive national deep dive is underway in Côte d’Ivoire, designed to provide development finance institutions with the investment-grade feasibility data they require before committing capital. Most ambitious is the exploration, alongside a development bank, of a music impact fund to finance what Shapiro calls the tracks: copyright infrastructure, enforcement, education and policy. “We need to build the tracks so the trains can run,” he said. “Because there are lots of trains.”

The obvious criticism of MEDI’s numbers is that they describe money that could exist, not money that does. Nothing about the $286 million is guaranteed. Collecting it would require the very things that have failed in these markets for decades: new laws, actual enforcement, collection societies that work, and licensing deals with telcos and broadcasters that have never volunteered to pay. MEDI does not dispute this. The forecast is meant to show governments what a functioning system would be worth, so that fixing the system becomes worth their while.

And there are small signs that things can change. In February, the Nigerian Copyright Commission paid out ₦1.21 billion to MCSN under the private copying levy, a charge on devices capable of copying music that had sat unused in Nigerian law since 1988. The sum is less than 1% of Nigeria’s annual opportunity. But it is money that was never collected for 38 years.

That, in the end, is MEDI’s whole argument. African music has already won its cultural battle. Its ability to win the economic battle depends on institutions, and for the first time, someone has quantified the cost of their absence to the industry.

Founders Connect Live Show is back! It is happening on July 18, 2026, in Lagos, and this year, the interview is the entire event.

One stage. One host. Honest conversations with some of Africa’s most interesting builders, live and unscripted, with you in the room.

Reserve your seat here

Last September, we announced the Communiqué Person of the Year Award to recognise Africans whose work over the past year has had a profound and demonstrable impact on the creative economy.

We’ve been working behind the scenes to make this happen, and now it’s time for you to do your part: nominate the people you think are deserving of the award.

Anyone, be it founders, artists, creators, or ecosystem builders, whose work between the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026 you think moves the needle and has a clear, discernible impact, is qualified.

We’ll research and verify every nomination to compile a long list, which an independent panel of industry stakeholders will review to determine the final winner.

Nominations close September 1, 2026.

Submit yours here

“I’m going to finish my term unless someone says I’ve done something wrong. And can prove it. I’m not resigning.”

It was not a comfortable position to be in. Michael Markovitz was sitting on the shrinking board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), watching colleagues resign one by one under political pressure. The board had lost its quorum. The government wanted them gone. And Markovitz refused to move. That stubbornness was not new. It was the same quality that had driven him to help build the very institution he was now trying to save.

Markovitz is one of the most consequential figures in South African media. He helped draft the laws that created an independent broadcast regulator after apartheid. He sat inside that regulator as it reshaped the country’s telecommunications and broadcasting landscape. He spent nearly a decade in the private sector learning the media business. And then, when the SABC — the public broadcaster he had fought to free from government control — fell back into political capture and near-financial collapse, he put his hand up to go back in and fix it.

To understand why he kept returning, you have to go back to Cape Town, where Markovitz grew up during the apartheid era. He was white, which meant he grew up on the side of privilege. But privilege also meant ignorance. The system was built to keep white South Africans from seeing what was being done in their name. “The whole idea was to cut us off from the reality of what was going on. The media was very controlled. The public broadcaster wasn’t a public broadcaster; it was a state broadcaster. And so we grew up in an environment where it was difficult to really find out what was going on.”

It was only in high school, through contact with older students already at university, that Markovitz began to understand the society he was living in. What he learned disturbed him. By the time he finished school, he was politically conscious and determined to avoid conscription into the apartheid military.

You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward.

Become a member.

The university offered a way out. He chose journalism, partly because he wanted to write, and partly because it kept him out of the army. He studied at a time when journalism schools were under heavy government surveillance. The security police knew these institutions were breeding grounds for dissent. Professors had been detained. The environment was tense.

After graduating, Markovitz left South Africa for Europe to further avoid conscription, travelling and working before eventually completing a master’s degree at the University of York in the UK. When he returned in 1987, apartheid was beginning to crack. By 1990, Nelson Mandela had been freed, and negotiations for a democratic transition were underway.

With the prospect of democracy suddenly becoming a reality, Markovitz decided to study law. He reasoned that a democratic South Africa would need new media laws and someone would have to write them. “My law degree brought the media and the law together for me. And I started writing about what a future democratic South Africa could look like, focusing on broadcasting rather than anything in those days. How the public broadcaster could be freed up, how new licenses could be issued, and how we could create an independent regulator to issue those licenses.”

He was already a member of the Film and Allied Workers Organisation, a body that represented anti-apartheid filmmakers and video producers. Through that organisation, he began publishing proposals for what a new broadcasting framework could look like. Because almost nobody else was approaching the issue from a legal angle, he quickly became the expert.

The reputation got him nominated to a technical committee at the constitutional negotiations in 1993, tasked with drafting the laws that would govern broadcasting in the new South Africa. He was still finishing his law degree. He was in his late twenties. And he was helping write legislation that would shape the country’s media for decades.

The committee’s work produced the Independent Broadcasting Authority Act. This law created a new independent regulator, established community-controlled broadcast licences as a category, and introduced local content quotas for South African music and film. It also made the governance of the SABC a constitutional issue, arguing that you could not hold free and fair elections if the state broadcaster remained a mouthpiece for the old regime. Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s current president, was among those who supported the push for an independent SABC board at the time. The first public appointment process for that board was broadcast live on television, a genuinely new thing in South African public life.

After the law passed and the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was established, Markovitz set up a consultancy helping community broadcasters navigate the new licensing system. Then IBA’s chairperson, Mandla Langa, invited him to work with him. So Markovitz moved from consultant to advisor, and eventually became part of the regulator itself, which later merged with the telecommunications regulator to become the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).

He spent six years there. The work included overseeing the partial privatisation of Telkom, licensing mobile operators, and managing the opening up of a telecoms market that had been a monopoly. Langa became a formative influence. “He taught me which battles to fight and which not to fight. I think it was an important lesson because, you know, as a young person, you want to fight everything; you want to die on any hill for your principle.”

When Langa’s term ended in 2005, Markovitz left with him.

After leaving ICASA, he joined Prime Media Group to work on the company’s digital strategy. It was the mid-2000s, and the conversation about convergence — how media infrastructure and content were beginning to merge — was just getting started. He became the head of a new digital outfit at Prime Media, tasked with identifying smaller digital companies to acquire. It was his first real immersion in the media business. He had been a journalist, an activist, a lawyer, and a regulator. He had never had to read a balance sheet.

“I didn’t do an MBA, but it became almost like my MBA on the job.”

He stayed for eight years, becoming an executive and learning the commercial mechanics of media from the inside. When he eventually left around 2014, he tried his hand at a telecoms startup, but that was just a brief interlude. He was soon back in the media.

In 2017, Markovitz joined the SABC board. This time, the work was not to create a new democratic broadcaster but to rescue the SABC, which had been damaged by state capture, political interference, and corrupt contracts under the Zuma administration. A 2017 High Court ruling affirmed the board’s independence from ministerial interference, giving reformers some legal protection. But the financial crisis was severe. Insolvency was looming, and the state treasury pushed the board to cut labour costs before government bailouts could be secured.

For Markovitz and other board members, the contradiction was painful. A public broadcaster exists to serve society, but it also has to survive. Saving the SABC meant making decisions that would hurt workers. When retrenchments moved forward, board members resigned, leaving the board without a quorum for a time. The remaining members held firm until the government filled the vacancies, allowing governance to continue.

The experience reinforced something he had long believed: fixing a broken institution is far harder than building one. And the SABC’s problems were not just about corruption. The funding model — heavily dependent on advertising while carrying expensive public service obligations like broadcasting in indigenous languages — was structurally broken. The licence fee system was widely ignored. A new approach to sustainability was needed.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

After the SABC, Markovitz turned to a different kind of institution-building. He set up a think tank at the Gordon Institute for Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, focused on media sustainability in the Global South. In 2023, the think tank hosted a major conference on Big Tech and journalism, drawing more than 100 participants from 24 countries and producing a set of principles for fair compensation between technology platforms and news publishers. It put the think tank on the map.

From there, Markovitz helped establish the CTRL J conference series: events in São Paulo, Jakarta, and Johannesburg, bringing together media leaders from Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Africa to share approaches to the sustainability crisis facing journalism globally.

But the initiative he speaks about with the most energy is an executive leadership programme he launched at GIBS for emerging African media leaders. The programme offers access to business school faculty and global media experts, with a strong emphasis on scholarships, because targeting an industry under financial pressure with an expensive programme only works if the money barrier can be removed. The inaugural cohort included strong Nigerian representation, with participants from Communiqué, the SABC, and Big Cabal Media, among others.

Markovitz wants to build a peer network of emerging leaders across the continent. He considers it the most meaningful work of his career. “If we can get 100 alumni of this program and build a proper alumni peer network of emerging African leaders from key countries, that, for me, would be a dream worth fighting for.”

He would not change much about the road that brought him here. Each stage made the next one possible. The one thing he wishes he had picked up earlier was financial literacy, the ability to read a balance sheet, to understand the business side of the industry he spent his life trying to protect. Everything else, he would do again.

Founders Connect Live Show is back! It is happening on July 18, 2026, in Lagos, and this year, the interview is the entire event.

One stage. One host. Honest conversations with some of Africa’s most interesting builders, live and unscripted, with you in the room.

Reserve your seat here

1. 25 years in the making

Frank Aigbogun did not set out to build Nigeria’s leading business publication. After 14 years at Vanguard, rising from pioneer news editor to general editor across all titles, he wanted out. The plan was plastic manufacturing. But investors would not back that venture. What they wanted to fund was journalism, which he knew how to do. So he picked up his pen again.

In 2001, he launched BusinessDay with a clear ambition: to become Nigeria’s top provider of business and financial intelligence. The market already had business publications at the time, but most of them were published weekly. Aigbogun believed that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the market’s rhythm. Deals close, policy shifts, companies report, capital moves, and executives decide every working day, not just on Mondays. If BusinessDay was going to serve that audience properly, it had to show up every business day.

But it started as a weekly publication, even though the ambition was always to publish daily. The transition was brutal. BusinessDay had to teach the market that a daily business newspaper was necessary. That meant printing copies of papers they were unsure would sell out, only to watch many of them go unsold. By Aigbogun’s own account, the company burned roughly ₦200 million getting there.

What made the bet bearable was capitalisation. BusinessDay was never a sole proprietorship. Aigbogun brought in investors from the start. In 2002, Dick Kramer — founder of Arthur Andersen Nigeria and co-founder of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group and Lagos Business School — took a 40% stake through his private equity firm, African Capital Alliance. Two years later, that stake grew to roughly 60%, when ACA formed Johnnic West Africa Limited as a joint venture with Johnnic Communications of South Africa, then owner of Business Day South Africa.

That structure gave BusinessDay something most Nigerian media companies don’t have: patient capital and institutional discipline. Equity, not debt, funded the transition to daily publishing. Had the company leveraged bank debt to fund that move, it likely wouldn’t have survived it. Instead, its early investors gave the paper room to fight for market share without a repayment clock ticking.

Capital wasn’t the whole story. BusinessDay also built governance around itself. Its founding board was chaired by the economist Pat Utomi and stocked with people willing to ask management hard questions. Alongside it, an editorial advisory board led by Dick Kramer met regularly for more than a decade: testing story ideas, questioning editors, keeping the publication honest about its purpose.

You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward.

Become a member.

2. The editor’s pipeline

Business reporting demands a different skill set from political or general-interest journalism: fluency in monetary policy and market behaviour, the ability to read a company’s annual report and balance sheet, and the discipline to write about both authoritatively for a high-level audience. BusinessDay’s institutional structure also gave its reporters something rarer: access. Company executives, regulators, and investors spoke to BusinessDay journalists with a candour they rarely extended to general-interest reporters, precisely because the paper had built a reputation for treating that information seriously. Those two things — technical fluency and institutional access — are exactly what international publications look for when covering emerging markets. It’s no accident that BusinessDay alumni, including Anthony Osae-Brown and Tayo Fagbule, went on to senior roles at Bloomberg and CNBC.

That movement is a function of how the newsroom was built. The macro factor is Nigeria’s business journalism market itself. Before BusinessDay, there was no daily training ground for reporters who wanted to cover markets, companies, and policy with the rigour that international outlets expect. Weekly titles produce generalists; a daily business desk produces specialists, because the volume forces reporters to develop a real understanding of specific sectors — banking, energy, capital markets — rather than covering business as one beat among many.

The micro factor is the editorial board that Aigbogun built early on. A board that meets for a decade, testing editors’ judgment and pushing back on weak stories, does something specific: it trains editors to defend their calls under scrutiny before they ever have to do it in front of a Bloomberg or CNBC assignment desk. That’s a skill international newsrooms hire for directly. BusinessDay’s editorial discipline wasn’t just a governance mechanism; it was, functionally, a training curriculum.

The result is that BusinessDay hasn’t just retained talent; it has also exported it to global business outlets. That, in itself, is a strong signal of credibility.

3. Teaching a market to pay

BusinessDay has also refused to treat the newspaper as a fixed product. It was built around print, but it did not stay there.

In 2015, it became the first Nigerian publication to launch a digital subscription product. At the time, paywalls were a hard sell in Nigerian media. Readers expected news for free online, and advertising still drove most of the digital business logic. BusinessDay made a different argument that if the journalism was useful enough for executives, investors, policymakers, and professionals to act on, it was valuable enough to pay for.

“If we practise good journalism, then it should be worth paying for,” Aigbogun said in an interview marking the paper’s 25th anniversary. “We have a mantra that, going forward, our focus will be journalism for a paying audience. We have no apologies about that. We would rather do that than ask people to donate to us.”

That strategy fit the audience like a glove. Unlike general-interest papers chasing individual readers, BusinessDay built a B2B subscription base comprising banks and financial services firms buying bulk access for their staff, executives, and high-net-worth clients.

Even the subscription model has evolved. In 2023, BusinessDay took down its paywall to re-strategise. During that period, readership quadrupled, and the newsroom used the data to study what readers actually liked and what they would pay for. By 2025, it had restored the paywall, with a sharper understanding of audience behaviour than before.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

4. The events engine

BusinessDay’s other major pillar is events. In 2009, it launched the CEO Forum, now one of Nigeria’s leading executive gatherings. From there, it built out sector-specific conferences across agriculture, finance, luxury, entertainment, pensions, real estate, and technology. In 2024, it hosted 38 events, generating about 32% of annual revenue.

That growth follows a pattern we now see across global media, where platforms use their journalism to reach influential audiences, and then they bring those audiences into physical spaces. Semafor offers a useful comparison. The American media startup grew its events portfolio from 12 events in 2022 to 80 in 2025, with events generating more than half of its reported $80 million annual revenue.

BusinessDay has built a healthy revenue mix that now includes paper sales, advertisements, subscriptions and events. Its twelfth event this year was the Creative Entertainment Summit, focused on Afrobeats monetisation, IP ownership, and royalty structures. That a business publication, not a culture outlet, is the one asking those questions is itself informative: it signals that BusinessDay defines “business” wide enough to include the creative economy’s commercial infrastructure.

The same instinct to meet the audience where it actually is has pushed BusinessDay into video. It now operates BusinessDay TV, launched in 2023 as a digital-first channel, streamed online and across social platforms. It is designed to bring the paper’s reporting and analysis to readers who now consume business information first on their phones and social feeds.

That’s the actual genius of BusinessDay after 25 years. Its survival hasn’t come from nostalgia for print but from rebuilding around its audience’s needs at every step: first, daily publishing; then subscriptions; then events; now, video. As Aigbogun puts it: “I think it’s important for journalism to continue to recreate itself, to continue to create a connection with society, to continue to create something that is local and of interest to the people. But more importantly, to be sure that whatever it does resonates with the people.”

Founders Connect Live Show is back! It is happening on July 18, 2026, in Lagos, and this year, the interview is the entire event.

One stage. One host. Honest conversations with some of Africa’s most interesting builders, live and unscripted, with you in the room.

Reserve your seat here

“I didn’t even know what corporate communications was. I just needed to secure the bursary.”

That is how Keagile Makgoba describes the decision that would determine the next 15 years of her career. She had applied to the University of Johannesburg to study marketing, but the course had already filled its assigned quota. An administrator at the university told her that the only spaces left in the system were for a course called corporate communications and asked if she wanted it. Because she was funding this admission on a bursary, she couldn’t take chances. “I said, you know what, it doesn’t matter. Don’t explain. I’ll figure it out.”

She did figure it out. Fifteen years and several roles later, Makgoba runs communications for one of the platforms that define how Africans tell their own stories. But the real story is not only that she stumbled into a career by accident. Her life has been shaped by access: receiving it, fighting for it, and trying to create it for other people.

Makgoba grew up in Soweto, a township in South Africa. Her parents divorced when she was young, so she and her siblings lived with her mother. At one point, her mother worked two jobs, leaving early and returning late, just to keep the family going. Money was often short. There were days when food at home was not guaranteed, and at school, the lack of money could become public. She remembers being singled out because fees had not been paid and missing trips for lack of money.

Still, school became one place where she could push back. From primary school, she was known as a diligent student. Each year, her mother would be called in for some academic, cultural or leadership award. “I think I’ve always just been determined to push through the circumstances,” she says. Eventually, she got a scholarship to complete her high school education. It was one of the first major examples of what she now describes as being “a product of a community.”

In Grade 11, she joined the Youth Leadership and Entrepreneurship Development programme, a year-long initiative sponsored by First National Bank and founded by Dr Steven Zwane. The programme taught soft skills, self-awareness, and entrepreneurship. Makgoba became the marketing manager for her group’s mock business. Soon, those lessons moved from theory into her own life. She began selling sweets, chocolates, and muffins in school, using part of the maintenance money her father sent as small capital.

The same youth leadership programme later nominated some participants for university bursaries. During the bursary interview, Makgoba said she wanted to study industrial psychology. It was not true. She thought a bank-funded programme would be more likely to support something that sounded serious and practical than something creative. One of the panellists saw through it and asked what she really wanted.

“I said, look, I’ve been super keen to go into marketing. I’ve heard a lot about it, but I don’t know the details. The only thing was that, at the time, marketing was all people would talk about. So if you said creative, it was only marketing. I didn’t know that there was something called PR and comms” She got the bursary in full: tuition, a stipend, and three years’ books. And then she had the encounter that led her to stumble into corporate communications.

You’re reading Communiqué because someone in the Inner Circle paid for it. Pay it forward.

Become a member.

The university did not make things easy. In her first year, she once missed a test because she did not have the money for transport to get to campus. So she worked. She handed out pamphlets at traffic lights, worked as a promoter for brands, worked in retail, and later managed social media pages for brands at a time when Facebook was becoming important and the phrase “community management” was not yet common.

“I’m not passionate about starting a business,” she says. “I just have an entrepreneurial mindset.” To Makgoba, entrepreneurship is the ability to gather resources, find people, pitch ideas, and make something work. In her case, that instinct would mostly live inside institutions. After completing her undergraduate degree in corporate communications in 2012, the university offered her a bursary for an honours degree in strategic communications. Around the same time, she got an internship at MultiChoice. She accepted both. The schedule was punishing. She woke up around 4 am, worked through the day, went to evening classes, and did assignments until almost midnight. Some nights, she napped in the university library and waited until morning to catch the first taxi home.

What she got in exchange for that schedule was an education no classroom could have given her. “The true meaning of comms for me shifted when I started working at MultiChoice. It was my lightbulb moment”

There, communications was not just theory. It was press events, employee emails, internal magazines, photo shoots, media gifts, celebrity visits and the everyday work of helping a large company speak clearly to different people. She packed PR materials, helped write short show descriptions for DStv, and worked on the launch of the DStv Explora decoder. She was also part of the company’s communications planning for Nelson Mandela’s death. On the day he died, she was in the building as everyone moved into action. It was a heavy moment, but it showed her the scale of what communications could carry inside a business and in a country.

The internship also gave her room to lead. When a CSR manager fell ill, Makgoba put up her hand and asked to run the campaign. She was still an intern, but she knew the process and wanted the responsibility.

From there, her career reads like a steady accumulation of responsibility that she was trusted with before anyone had fully explained the job to her. A short stint as a tech recruiter at Afrizan led, almost by accident, to a call from Instinctif Partners about a role in investor relations, a field she had never heard of either. “I said, ‘What is investor relations? I don’t even know what that is,’” she remembers telling them. “They said, you know what, come for the interview; we’ll tell you more.”

She took the offer, started in a junior role, and within two years, she was promoted twice and moved departments to handle even bigger projects. She eventually built the firm’s first bursary and internship programme, modelled directly on the one that had funded her own education. Several of those interns now work at Nestlé, FTI, and Investec.

She left Instinctif Partners for TikTok in 2020. She has spent close to five years building the company’s communications function across Africa, in a role that sits at the intersection of technology, culture, government, creators, and public trust.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

For her, TikTok matters because it lowers the barrier. A creator no longer has to wait for a traditional institution to notice them before they can be seen. A musician, comedian, dancer, educator, or storyteller can reach people beyond their city, country, and even continent. Platforms also sit at the centre of difficult conversations about policy, safety, power, and public understanding. But that is partly why Makgoba sees communications as strategic work, because it helps people understand how technology affects their lives.

This is also why she has stayed. She has turned down offers from other companies, including better-paying roles, because she feels there is more to give on the continent. “If we all leave, who’s going to stay behind and build it?” she says. “I’m not learning so that I can disappear. I want to give more to my people.”

That belief has shaped her life outside work too. Seventeen years after joining the Youth Leadership and Entrepreneurship Development programme, she still volunteers with it. She mentors through the International Women’s Forum of South Africa’s Young Leaders Connect programme and advises postgraduate business students at the Gordon Institute of Business Science. She is also considering starting her own Pan-African programme for young people, focused on providing exposure, mentorship, and scholarships.

Her next chapter may take her deeper into policy. Last year, while waiting for a flight, she had a conversation with Chernor Bah, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Civic Education. He asked her about Africa, technology, and the future she imagined for the continent. After that conversation, he nominated her for the Desmond Tutu African Leadership Fellowship. She was selected.

For Makgoba, it confirmed something she had already begun to see: communications belongs in bigger rooms. “For a very long time, the communications function was just seen as a support function,” she says. “But what communications is doing today is shaping policy. It’s shaping the execution of those policies, how those policies are received, and how citizens thrive in communities.”

It is a long way from a university administrator telling a teenager that the marketing class was full, but that there was space in something called corporate communications, and Makgoba understands it. “I guess I fell into my passion by chance, because I didn’t even know what corporate communications was. But I love it now.”

Founders Connect Live Show is back! It is happening on July 18, 2026, in Lagos, and this year, the interview is the entire event.

One stage. One host. Honest conversations with some of Africa’s most interesting builders, live and unscripted, with you in the room.

Reserve your seat here

1. The new face of news

On May 15, gunmen attacked schools in Oyo State, South-West Nigeria, abducting dozens of children and teachers. By the time fuller reports emerged, 39 students and seven teachers had been taken from a secondary school and two primary schools, with some of the children as young as two.

The incident shocked the country not only because of the age of the victims, but because of where it happened. For much of the last decade, mass school abductions had been treated as a horror associated mostly with the North East and parts of the North West, where Boko Haram, ISWAP and armed groups had turned classrooms into targets. Oyo forced a different kind of reckoning. The fear that had long shaped conversations about education and insecurity in northern Nigeria had travelled down South. As outrage mounted, millions of Nigerians tried to make sense of what had happened.

One of the people helping them do that was the Arise News journalist Adesuwa Giwa-Osagie. But this time, not from the grounds of the National Assembly, where she covers the parliamentary beat or from behind her Arise News desk, but on her own social media channels. In one Instagram reel, Giwa-Osagie identified JAS (Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad), a faction of the Boko Haram terrorist group, as the group believed to be behind the attack. In another video, she explained how terrorism is funded in Nigeria. Together, both videos have been watched more than 450,000 times. Many of those viewers were encountering the explanation of the tragedy not through a television segment or a newspaper report, but through a journalist speaking directly to them in the language and rhythm of social media. This is the growing power of the news creator.

According to the Pew Research Centre, a news creator or influencer is someone who regularly posts about current events and civic issues on social media and has at least 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube. They may be trained journalists, subject-matter experts, commentators, satirists, or social-first personalities. What defines them is not the title they carry but the role they have come to play: making sense of events for an audience often overwhelmed by the speed and noise of the news cycle.

Globally, news creators are becoming an important part of the average individual’s media diet. According to the 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 27% of respondents across 48 markets say they consume some news from news-focused creators every week, while 13% say most or all of their news needs are met by these creators. But in Africa, the figures are significantly higher. In Nigeria, 34% of respondents say most or all of their news needs are met by news creators, while 57% consume some news from them weekly. In Kenya, 33% say most or all of their news needs are met by news creators, while 58% consume some news from them every week.

The phenomenon is not limited to hard news. Across various sectors, Nigerians are increasingly relying on individuals, not only institutions, to follow the news. In the tech industry, for instance, a growing number of people first hear about fundraising, layoffs, product launches and ecosystem shifts from creators like Abayomi Semudara, who translate startup news into accessible commentary. In sports, creators like Sulaiman Pooja Adebayo have become part of the way fans follow transfers, football federation politics, and the daily drama around Nigerian football. In health, business, politics, entertainment and culture, the same pattern is becoming clearer: the person explaining the news is becoming almost as important as the organisation that reported it.

Communiqué has an Inner Circle now. It’s the group of readers who decide that independent reporting and analysis of Africa’s creative economy are worth paying for.

Join the Inner Circle

2. Who owns the news value chain?

Traditional media organisations once controlled most of the news value chain. Beyond publishing information, they managed almost every stage through which an event became public knowledge. A reporter discovered what had happened. An editor or producer tested that information against documents, sources, and context to determine its veracity. The newsroom then interpreted the event, deciding what it meant, why it mattered, and how to frame it for the public. After that, the organisation distributed the story through print, radio, television, websites, newsletters, or social channels. It also conferred legitimacy, deciding which events deserved attention and which did not. Finally, it preserved memory, keeping the story in an archive so that it could be returned to, cited or built upon later.

For much of modern media history, these functions sat inside the same institution, whether a newspaper, TV or radio station, or digital newsroom. But increasingly, news creators are taking over two of the most valuable parts of the chain: distribution and interpretation. They help the news travel and help audiences decide what it means. This shift has become even more significant as trust in news declines globally. According to the 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, global trust in news stands at 37%, down from 48% in 2021. In Nigeria, however, trust in news remains comparatively high, rising from 58% in 2021 to 68% in 2026.

The question, then, is not whether news creators are replacing Nigerian media. It is what their rise means for Nigerian media organisations and how those organisations must adapt to a changing landscape.

3. A brave new world

The first major implication is trust. A viewer watches Channels Television because the station has covered Nigerian politics for decades. In the same vein, the reader opens The Punch or Premium Times because they recognise the masthead. The institution produces trust: its editorial process, its record of accuracy, its access to power, and its sources.

Creator trust works differently. It is built around voice, consistency, relatability, courage, anger, humour, or expertise. This means media companies will have to stop hiding completely behind the brand. People may respect Arise News for its reputation for credible political coverage, but many also tune in to hear anchor Rufai Oseni’s commentary or his banter with colleague Reuben Abati.

In this brave new world that the Reuters Institute’s report spotlights, the journalist is not just a member of the newsroom but a key part of its distribution engine. This has implications for the relationship between media companies and their talent. The most in-demand journalists are now those with large, loyal audiences of their own. Alongside reporting skills, they bring reach and trust. Globally, media companies are having to think about journalist contracts less as ordinary employment agreements and more as talent contracts, and to consider factors such as revenue sharing, IP ownership, non-competes, and appearance rights.

Newsrooms have also become training grounds for future creators. For example, Eniola Olanrewaju, better known as Korty, joined Big Cabal Media after graduating from university, learned the ropes of production, and later left to build her own career as a creator. More journalists and producers will follow that path: learn inside an institution, acquire taste and discipline, then leave to build independently.

This has already happened in other media markets. For example, Mehdi Hasan left MSNBC and launched Zeteo, his own independent media company. In Nigeria, this has mostly happened with writers leaving traditional media to start Substack newsletters. But the same shift could extend to broadcast journalists. There are already early signs. In 2022, Channels TV broadcaster Seun Okinbaloye launched his Mic On Podcast, while Adesuwa Giwa-Osagie launched her YouTube show Untold Stories a year later. Neither has fully gone independent yet, but the direction is clear.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

Advertising will also follow this shift. Advertisers will increasingly move towards news media organisations that can combine credibility with creator-led loyalty. Large reach will still matter, but smaller media organisations built around trusted personalities with direct audience relationships will become more attractive to advertisers than traditional platforms with bigger but weaker audience relationships.

But this shift also has limits. If the tools are now available to everyone, why is the news-creator ecosystem in Africa still less developed than in the West? The answer is that publishing tools are not the same as media infrastructure.

A journalist may leave a newsroom with credibility, experience, and a loyal audience, but that does not automatically translate into a sustainable independent media business. The same economic, political, and cultural pressures that weaken traditional media organisations will follow the journalist outside the newsroom. For instance, the political pressure a journalist will face in a traditional media organisation will not disappear just because he now publishes on YouTube or Substack. If anything, the independent journalists may be more exposed because they no longer have the institutional cover of a newsroom, legal department, editor or corporate owner.

This means there is not yet a clear pathway from journalist to successful independent news creator across Africa. A journalist can build visibility, but visibility is not the same as a business model. To become durable, they need production support, research help, editing, distribution, sales, and legal advice. In more mature creator markets, these functions increasingly exist around successful creator-journalists. On the continent, that support system is still thin.

There is also the question of advertising. News creators may have trust and direct relationships with audiences, but large-scale marketing spend still tends to favour established media organisations. Advertisers understand how to buy space on television, radio, newspapers, websites and big media platforms. They are more cautious when the product is a single independent journalist whose work may involve politics, controversy, or criticism of power. The exception is entertainment, where skitmakers, lifestyle vloggers, and pop culture creators have shown that media buyers are willing to spend heavily when the content is safer and more lighthearted.

News creators may not be burdened by the slow processes and institutional caution of traditional media, but they still operate within the same weak media economy. This is why the African news creator ecosystem may produce influential individuals before it produces any durable creator-led news institutions.

What do you want to understand about Africa’s media and creative industries? Send us your questions, observations, or topics you think deserve deeper reporting.

Tell us here

“Music led me to journalism. It wasn’t the other way around.”

There was a period, not too long ago, when Motolani Alake’s name was nearly unavoidable in conversations about Nigerian music. He was the critic whose reviews artists waited for nervously, whose voice international outlets reached for whenever they needed someone to explain Afrobeats to the rest of the world. He built that reputation loudly, but ask him how he got there, and he tells a quieter story.

Music was the first language he was fluent in, long before he had words of his own to write with; it was the thing he argued about in secondary school, the thing he spent hours listening to. He tried to understand it even when he lacked the language to explain why certain songs worked, and others did not. Everything that followed — the journalism, the critiquing, his current executive role at a major music record label — has, in his telling, been the same instinct finding new forms of expression.

“I feel like everything that has happened in my life led me there,” he says.

As a child, Alake was not the bookworm people might expect a future journalist to be. In their household, his father insisted that he and his siblings “read wide.” His two sisters followed the advice, burning through several novels in a week. Alake did not. His interest lay elsewhere, in music, sports and other entertainment pursuits.

At 16, after finishing secondary school, a friend introduced him to Fruity Loops, digital music production software. Alake taught himself production and sound engineering, spending hours trying to understand how records were built. Years later, when people praised his criticism, they often focused on the writing. What they didn’t see was the years he had already spent studying music before he ever wrote about it professionally.

Alake got into university to study Law, largely because his grades allowed it and Law was, for any Nigerian teenage art student, the obvious ceiling to reach for, but he had no plans of ever practising professionally.

After graduation and law school, Alake was posted to a law firm in Akwa Ibom State, southern Nigeria, for his compulsory national service. The period provided one of the most important influences on his writing. His boss was a good writer who helped him fine-tune his skills, focusing on precision and clarity. Those lessons would stay with him long after he left his law degree behind.

By the time his service year ended, he knew he was not to practise law. The problem was that he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do instead. What followed was one of the most uncertain seasons of his life. He took on different jobs, consulted briefly for USAID, and later worked for the Foreign Investment Network in Abuja. But none of it felt right. “I felt like a round peg in a square hole.” Looking back now, he knows he was depressed. But the one thing that consistently made him happy in those times was writing.

Alongside a group of friends, he had started a Medium publication called Urban Central. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it gave him a lifeline. “Any time I would write, I was really happy doing it.” The more he wrote, the more obvious it was that the media was where he belonged. In 2018, he applied for a role at Pulse and was rejected. A few months later, he tried again—then he got in.

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. One-time or recurring: every contribution keeps us accountable to readers.

Support us

Today, when he talks about Pulse, he sounds less like someone describing an employer and more like someone describing a turning point: “Pulse gave me clarity. And the second thing is, it gave me community.” Before Pulse, he says he often felt like a misfit. At Pulse, he found people who understood him. More importantly, he found people who believed in him. Writers he had admired from a distance, like Osagie Alonge, became colleagues. Their confidence in him strengthened his own. “If this guy is telling me that I’m the shit, then maybe I am.”

Pulse gave him the opportunity, but not immediately. Although he was hired as a pop culture reporter, he was soon moved to the Metro desk, one of the toughest beats in the newsroom. The stories were often grim and emotionally draining: murders, assaults, domestic violence, the kind of stories that can wear a person down. Alake hated it.

His editors began to notice and soon found a compromise. If he could complete his Metro assignments and spend the rest of his time writing the longer culture and music pieces he actually cared about. He arrived with a chip on his shoulder, and the chip showed up in his writing. He had strong opinions about music, and he wanted people to hear them. “I had a lot of fire, and I felt like the world needed to hear my voice.”

In 2019, he wrote his first hit story. At the time, the long-running feud between rappers M.I Abaga and Vector was dominating conversations in Nigerian music. One Friday night, Alake slept at the Pulse office to avoid the notorious Lagos traffic on his way home. The next morning, he woke up to find social media in a frenzy over the latest development in the rivalry, so he wrote a detailed history of the feud, and the article went viral. “That was when my life changed. Literally.”

Before then, a good article might get a few dozen shares. Afterwards, television stations began inviting him to discuss music. More people started paying attention to his work. His name began travelling beyond the confines of Pulse. The rest of 2019 only accelerated the process. There was the decade list that generated endless arguments. Some reviews angered fans and artists alike, including a particularly critical review of Wizkid’s Soundman Vol. 1 project. Within a few months, Alake had developed a reputation as one of Nigerian music’s most fearless and controversial critics.

Then came 2020, his annus mirabilis.

While Burna Boy’s Grammy nomination dominated headlines, Alake became interested in a different story. He wanted to find the first Nigerian ever to win a Grammy.

Through a series of hopeful Instagram messages, he eventually tracked down percussionist Sikiru Adepoju, who had won the award in 2009 for his work on the Global Drum Project, and secured an interview. This story also went viral. Around the same time, COVID-19 lockdowns pushed more conversations online. As Afrobeats continued its global rise, international media organisations began seeking Nigerian voices to explain the genre and the culture surrounding it. Alake became one of them.

Pulse also revived its Facts Only video series with him fronting it; by the end of the year, it had become one of the publisher’s biggest products. His newsletter and playlist, Listen Africa, were also gaining traction. Labels, artists and industry executives increasingly knew who he was.

His growing visibility soon brought conflict—the most public of those conflicts involved musician Tiwa Savage. The tension dated back to his criticism of her 2019 single “49-99”, and lingered into the following year when he interviewed her for Pulse. Savage initially declined the interview, citing discomfort, before eventually agreeing. Although the conversation was cordial, Alake could sense the strain between them. When he later reviewed her album Celia, a review he maintains was fair, the existing friction appeared to have shaped its reception.

Things escalated when Alake left Celia off his year-end list just as the album made The New York Times’ top ten albums of the year. Savage responded with a tweet referencing the biblical line that a prophet is never honoured in his hometown, widely interpreted as a swipe at him. Alake responded by turning the tweet into a news story and later publishing a longer defence of his position. The disagreement spilt onto X (formerly Twitter) until veteran journalist Azuka Ogujiuba stepped in to mediate. During the conversation, Alake stood by his criticism but conceded one point. Ogujiuba felt he had crossed a line by invoking the age difference between himself and Savage. “I didn’t have a defence for that part,” he says. “I apologised.” The dispute was resolved soon afterwards, and today he describes Savage as one of his good friends.

By 2022, Alake was Editor-in-Chief at Pulse. From the outside, things looked perfect, but he was exhausted. “I was burned out,” he says. “I would have loved to continue, but I needed a one- or two-year break.”

Since 2021, he had been receiving job offers to move client-side, so he had begun to take them seriously. In October 2022, he left Pulse and joined M.A.D Solutions, a music distributor, publisher and technical solutions provider in Africa, where he served as General Manager of Engage, their record label arm. A few months later, a major music label came calling. This time, the decision was easy.

The move from critic to executive has been, in his words, both “eye-opening” and “very humbling.” As a journalist, he could focus almost entirely on ideas and creative judgment. As an executive, he has had to learn an entirely different set of skills: financial analysis, strategy, negotiation, portfolio management, and so on. Understanding not just what makes artistic sense, but what makes business sense. “I now need to think strategically as opposed to just creatively.”

The experience has also changed how he views the industry he once reported on. He now understands the complexity behind decisions that once seemed simple. He understands the pressures artists, labels, and executives face. Most importantly, he understands that building an industry requires more than commentary. It requires participation.

Even though the titles have changed — from reporter to critic and reviewer, from editor-in-chief to executive — even inside the spreadsheets and the strategy decks, the drive and hunger that got him here in the first place haven’t. Alake insists the story is still unfinished.

“I really don’t think I’m at my peak yet.”

Join a growing group of readers who keep Communiqué independent: Founders, journalists, investors, and operators from 100+ countries fund this work directly.

Add your name

1. Let’s start a fire

In September 2025, Yossie Olaleye emailed me to ask if we could organise a Communiqué IRL event in London. She’d seen what we did in Nairobi the month before and thought it might be a good idea to extend the series to London. At the time, we’d been exploring that option internally, but we never made any headway. For us, Yossie’s email was providential. The next day, we hopped on a call and began making concrete plans. We already had a topic and a potential speaker list, but there was no venue or sponsor.

We updated our concept note, began reaching out to potential partners, and suddenly, what seemed abstract a few months prior became more apparent. We got a venue at King’s College London with the help of Professor Roberta Comunain, settled on a date in 2026, and received support from LAGO Collective to fine-tune the arrangements.

On June 19, 2026 — ten months after Yossie reached out — we hosted the first edition of Communiqué IRL outside Africa, with a room full of people interested in the things we’ve been writing about for the last six years. That felt like validation that we are heading in the right direction.

2. The fire rises

I haven’t fully processed the impact and happenings of that event. But for now, I want to discuss three main points I took away from that night’s conversations.

The first concerns the actual size of the African diaspora market and the lack of comprehensive data on its purchasing power. The second covers the opportunity for diaspora members to plug the operator gap that continues to plague Africa’s creative economy. The third is the need for better-quality policy conversations between African governments and countries with strong diaspora heatmaps.

Let’s dig in.

3. Measuring the wrong things

When people talk about the diaspora as a market for African creative businesses, their standard reference point is often remittance data. They say things like this: In 2024, over $104 billion flowed into Africa in remittances — roughly twice the volume of overseas development assistance. Nigeria received $19.8 billion. Ghana received $4.6 billion in officially recorded remittances, exceeding what the country earned from cocoa exports alone.

These numbers are real, but they are not useful in this conversation.

Remittances are support mechanisms — money sent “back home” to stock the fridge, fund school fees, cover medical bills, etc. Around 75% goes toward exactly these purposes, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). They are not discretionary income, and they tell us nothing about whether a Nigerian in London will pay for a film, a festival ticket, or a media subscription. The person sending a significant portion of her salary home to Accra is often the last in the room with budget for cultural consumption.

We referenced the diaspora’s economic significance in “Culture in a Box” to argue that African cultural exports deserve more serious institutional attention. But the data infrastructure to quantify what the diaspora will spend on cultural goods — as distinct from what it sends home — barely exists. For instance, how do we know what share of diaspora discretionary income goes toward cultural categories, such as music, film, fashion, food, literature, live events? Which of these goods commands the most loyalty? How does that spending behaviour shift across first-, second-, and third-generation communities? Does a second-generation Ghanaian in London relate to Afrobeats the same way as someone who moved three years ago? These are questions that have not been codified, because a large remittance figure is readily available and looks good on a pitch deck.

Communiqué will commit to building better diaspora intelligence over the coming years. But we cannot do it alone — we need partners, institutional collaborators, and other organisations willing to share data and fill in our blind spots.

The first step, however, is being clear about what the current data doesn’t tell us.

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. One-time or recurring: every contribution keeps us accountable to readers.

Support us

4. The operator gap

In Communiqué 121, we noted that capital is becoming more available to Africa’s creative economy, but the sector continues to lack serious operators — people who understand finance, business strategy, and the intricacies of venture building.

The tech sector has already run this experiment. Over the past decade, African professionals who had spent years at technology companies abroad returned with operational capacity that local ecosystems lacked. The results were not perfect, but they were clear. The creative economy needs its own version of this. People who have built careers inside global creative operations — record labels, streaming platforms, film studios, rights management companies — and who could bring that expertise to bear on building in Africa are exactly the profile the sector needs.

There is also a structural problem that returning professionals alone cannot fix. The ecosystem has spent years trying to turn creatives into operators. Those are more unicorns than templates. A gifted musician is not automatically equipped to run a finance function or manage a multi-year licensing deal. What we need are systems designed for people who already have operational skills — accelerators and fellowships that help operators understand why the creative economy is the right place to deploy what they already know, not programmes that teach creatives to write business plans. The creatives themselves also have to be honest enough and willing to work with such people to expand their business.

5. The London Bridge

My time in London makes it clear that the city has incredible potential to be the de facto primary Western hub for Africa’s creative economy. The African diaspora presence is exceptionally dense — full of Nigerian, Ghanaian, Kenyan, Zimbabwean, and South African communities with deep roots and active professional lives. The geographical proximity to the continent could also be an advantage. And the geopolitical relationships between the UK and African nations, complicated as they are historically, provide a foundation for institutional dialogue that need not start from scratch.

But there is the problem.

LAGO Collective has been tracking the financial cost of European visa regimes on African applicants. In 2024, rejected Schengen applications cost African countries €60 million in non-refundable fees. In the UK, rejected visitor visa applications generated £50.7 million in revenue, a 13.5% increase from 2023. The UK extracted approximately £10 million from rejected applications from Nigeria and Ghana alone, at rejection rates above 40% for both countries. LAGO’s founder, Marta Foresti, calls these fees “reverse remittances,” which are “money flowing from poor to rich countries.” Of the 13 countries that faced Schengen rejection rates above 40% in 2024, nine were African. The poorer the country, the higher the rejection rate.

UK visa fees rose from £100 to £115 in July 2024, then to £127 in April 2025. The result is that the very cohort who would make London a creative economy hub worth having — artists, executives, journalists, entrepreneurs — are being turned away or priced out. A country positioning itself as a global creative capital while systematically blocking the African practitioners who would populate that ecosystem is taxing aspiration, not facilitating trade.

African creative economy ministries have to put visas and mobility on the table as trade and diplomatic issues. They cannot dance around these issues. Cultural cooperation agreements that do not address people’s freedom of movement are incomplete. MOUs that do not name visa rejection rates are merely designed to make governments feel productive while solving nothing. We must deal with the mobility problem.

6. Parting words

Hosting our first event outside Africa — an event that talked specifically about building cross-cultural and economic bridges — was proof that the Communiqué community extends beyond the continent, and that the conversations we have been having for six years resonate with people who are physically far from Lagos or Nairobi but close to what is happening there in every other way.

The London event surfaced three problems the creative economy needs to solve. We need real data on what the African diaspora actually spends on cultural goods. We need an operational layer that matches the talent need and scale of the incoming capital. And we need governments to treat cross-border mobility as the trade issue it is.

These problems will not resolve themselves, and we will keep making the case until the right people treat them with the seriousness they deserve.

Join a growing group of readers who keep Communiqué independent: Founders, journalists, investors, and operators from 100+ countries fund this work directly.

Add your name

Turning virality and cultural relevance into sustainable revenue is hard to do in Africa. But Jola Ayeye, Feyikemi Abudu, and the I Said What I Said (ISWIS) podcast team are some of the very few who seem to have figured it out.

On June 17, the team announced its 2026 live show tour, the biggest in its history yet: 12 cities across 6 countries and 3 continents. For a show that began with two friends having honest conversations online, and spent its first five years as a passion project with a loyal audience but no clearly defined revenue model, that is a remarkable leap. The successes ISWIS enjoys today did not happen by accident.

In this maiden episode of Creative Capital, we break down the decisions that Ayeye and Abudu made to turn ISWIS into one of Africa’s most-loved podcasts and a business with several revenue lines.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How ISWIS built an audience across Nigeria and the diaspora by closely observing audience behaviour and creating experiences that met real audience needs.

• Why the team’s willingness to experiment with different formats, events, and revenue models became one of its greatest competitive advantages.

• How a live show in London became a turning point for the business, and why a Spotify grant proved more valuable than many traditional brand partnerships.

• How seemingly small ideas like aso-ebi dress codes, raffle tickets, and audience participation games became reliable sources of revenue for the podcast.

Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

“Why would I want to be damned for the things I publish?”

The phrase made no sense to John-Allan Namu. He was sitting in his first journalism class at the United States International University in Nairobi when veteran Kenyan journalist Joe Kadhi walked in and greeted a room full of students with four words: “Publish and be damned.” Namu remembers thinking it was a strange thing to tell people who were only just learning to become journalists. Why would anyone want to be damned for something they published? Years later, it would feel less like a classroom slogan and more like a job description.

By then, Namu would have spent years investigating corruption, exposing fraud, challenging official narratives, and building one of Africa’s most respected investigative newsrooms. He would reject a five-figure bribe, survive a career-threatening reporting mistake, face pressure from powerful interests, and eventually leave mainstream television to build an independent newsroom of his own. Yet none of it was planned. In fact, if things had gone according to plan, John-Allan Namu would never have become a journalist at all.

Namu grew up in a typical middle-class Kenyan family. His father was a banker, while his mother was a librarian. He was the youngest of four children. For much of his childhood, his parents managed to shield the family from the political and economic turbulence that defined Kenya during the 1980s and 1990s. But eventually the country’s problems reached their doorstep. His father had been brought into a government-owned bank that was already in trouble. By the time he arrived, the institution was struggling to survive. Eventually it collapsed. His father remained behind to help manage the fallout, but afterwards work became difficult to find.

The family survived largely on his mother’s salary and whatever consulting work his father could secure. For the first time, Namu began to understand that life outside his immediate surroundings looked very different. “When you’re living a certain lifestyle, you’re sheltered from some of the actual realities of the country that you grow up in.” His parents responded the only way they knew how. They doubled down on education. “They were heavily invested in a good education because that’s what had transformed their lives.”

Communiqué has an Inner Circle now. It’s the group of readers who decide that independent reporting and analysis of Africa’s creative economy is worth paying for.

Join the Inner Circle

Namu attended good schools and eventually found his way into university to study International Relations. Like many politically curious young Kenyans of his generation, he imagined a future in diplomacy or politics. Then journalism got in the way. Part of the attraction was timing. Kenya had recently emerged from the twenty-four-year rule of Daniel arap Moi. A new period of political openness was taking shape. The media was gaining influence. Journalists mattered.

But there was also a more personal reason: a few years earlier, his father had become the subject of intense media scrutiny after being accused of wrongdoing while serving as managing director of one of the country’s largest brokerage firms. Namu often accompanied him to court during the trial and watched, with quiet frustration, as the proceedings were later misrepresented in the papers. He did not think of it as formative then. Only later, connecting dots backwards, did he come to see it as the moment something was planted. “It taught me that if I ever got the opportunity, I would treat people’s stories with the respect that they deserve and be as factual as possible.”

In Kadhi’s class and a few others, he found a frame for that desire. Namu applied himself to journalism; it helped that he had always been drawn to writing and storytelling. Towards the end of his stay on campus, the managing editor of Kenyan Television Network (KTN), a local private free-to-air TV network, came to give a talk at his university; Namu was one of the students selected for a mock news presentation. The editor felt he was quite the talent and invited him to apply for an internship. He joined in December 2005, still a student, and threw himself at the work completely. “After I joined, I did my best to try and learn the ropes as quickly as possible.”

He would stay behind after everyone had to work on the TV channel’s late-night bulletin. “Not many people watched that bulletin; that was where I’d get a chance to file my own stories and practice my voiceover and practice my skills. It was a low-risk but high-reward bulletin for me.” Most nights, he left the office after midnight and was back early the next morning. By the time he was graduating, he already had a job as a staff reporter.

A year in, Namu started drifting toward feature storytelling. He felt that the 90 seconds or 2 minutes allotted to the news bulletin weren’t enough to go in depth and tell nuanced, complex stories. Around this time, he struck up a friendship with Mohammed Ali, a colleague with a stronger interest in investigative reporting.

Together, the pair began working on increasingly ambitious stories. First came stories about gangs and drug abuse, then small undercover operations targeting con artists. Gradually, they built the skills that investigative reporting required.

Then a major story landed. A businessman was charging customers for vehicle tracking devices that often were never installed. After months of work, they gathered enough evidence to confront him. The businessman offered them $10,000 to walk away. “We could either take the bribe and be done with the story, or we could do the right thing.” They published, and the story put them on the map.

Afterwards, they helped revive KTN’s dormant investigative programme, Inside Story. Namu hosted the English version, while Ali launched the Swahili edition, Jicho Pevu. They ran these shows to great acclaim, making a name for themselves in the Kenyan media industry and public space. But after a few years, Namu needed a new challenge; he wanted to know what more he was capable of doing. “While I felt that we had done some really successful things with the Inside Story, I felt that I needed to just figure out who I was as a journalist on my own. I needed to understand whether I’d be able to continue these things as an individual, but also develop my own style.”

So he left for Nation TV (NTV), a rival TV channel to KTN, after long conversations with Ali and his colleagues, as well as with a mentor who recently moved to NTV. The move was worth it. Not only was Namu given more freedom in the kinds of stories he covered, but he also had the opportunity to sit at the feet of veteran journalists at NTV’s parent company, Nation Media Group, the country’s largest and oldest media company. The experiences helped him understand what kind of reporter he was when no one else was defining it for him.

His time at NTV also brought the most difficult experience of his career. At the centre of it was Félicien Kabuga, one of the financiers of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. For years, Kabuga had been one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, and there were persistent rumours that he was hiding in Kenya. Namu followed the trail. He cultivated sources, tracked leads, and gathered evidence suggesting that Kabuga had indeed built business interests in Kenya while receiving protection from powerful individuals. Then everything fell apart. A photograph that formed part of the investigation turned out to be of an innocent man. The image had been vetted through multiple sources and debated extensively in the newsroom before publication. Yet it was wrong. “I thought I was going to be fired.”

Instead, his editors stood by him. The experience left him more cautious and more rigorous. “Not all stories are a positive upward trajectory,” he says. “There are also setbacks that shape who you become.” Not long afterwards, Namu returned to KTN, this time as Special Projects Editor. He had proven to himself that he could stand on his own; now he wanted to influence the direction of long-form journalism and help build the next generation of reporters.

The move reunited him with Mohammed Ali and another close colleague, Kassim Mohammed. Together they expanded investigative and feature storytelling within the newsroom. But the deeper their reporting went, the more pressure they faced.

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

Investigations into Kenya’s 2013 election and the Westgate terror attack challenged official narratives and attracted scrutiny from powerful interests. That pressure increasingly found its way into editorial processes. For Namu, it revived an old question.

What would it look like to build an investigative newsroom entirely on one’s own terms?

The idea had first emerged in conversations with Ali and Mohammed years earlier. Now it felt less like a hypothetical and more like a necessity. Africa Uncensored was registered in 2014. Namu left KTN in 2015. The transition was not easy. Investigative journalism is expensive, and independence comes with its own challenges. Like many organisations of its kind, Africa Uncensored relied partly on grants. But Namu always believed sustainability would require something more.

That thinking eventually led to Shahara, a digital platform designed to help creators publish content directly to audiences and earn revenue from them. The idea showed promise but arrived at a difficult moment. YouTube, Instagram and later TikTok were already giving creators ways to monetise their audiences. “We underestimated just how difficult it would be for content creators to move from platforms where their audiences already were.” While Shahara struggled to gain traction, Africa Uncensored continued to grow.

The team broke the infamous story of the fertiliser deception investigation, in which it found a businessman packaging soil and diatomised earth as subsidised farm inputs and selling them to farmers across the country. It led to Senate and National Assembly hearings, the cancellation of government tenders and refunds to farmers nationwide.

Yet when Namu reflects on his career, it is not these investigations that give him the greatest satisfaction. Instead, he talks about the journalists. “The kind of satisfaction I get from seeing people who came into contact with African Uncensored and had better careers as a result, that is more edifying than any of the big stories I’ve done.”

That answer says a lot about how his thinking has evolved. The younger Namu wanted to tell important stories. The older Namu wants to build institutions that help others tell them. At the time of this interview, he was nearing the end of a year-long John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, thinking deeply about what comes next.

His answer remains surprisingly simple. “Journalism only flourishes if it’s useful to the public.”

RSVP here to secure your slot

1. Point of correction

Osahon Akpata began our conversation by correcting a misconception.

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

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

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

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

2. To be or not to be

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

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

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

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

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

Communiqué has an Inner Circle now. It’s the group of readers who decide that independent reporting and analysis of Africa’s creative economy is worth paying for.

Join the Inner Circle

3. The anatomy of an investment strategy

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

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

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

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

The second is film production and distribution infrastructure — the operational layer of the screen business. Here you have ventures like Fusion Intelligence, whose software already runs more than half of West Africa’s cinemas and whose newer tools push real-time box office and royalty data to producers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your contribution funds: Original reporting, data licensing, and a small editorial team that actually answers your replies. No ads, no paywalls.

Contribute Here

4. No free lunches

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

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

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

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

5. The hard thing about hard things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. What does success look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s note: The essay has an updated list of investable ecosystem assets.

What do you want to understand about Africa’s creative industry? Send us your questions, observations, or topics you think deserve deeper reporting.

Tell us here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. Every contribution keeps us accountable to you.

Support us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSVP here to secure your slot

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

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

1. Counting the cost

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

In Communiqué 119, we defined the problem:

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

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

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

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

2. How to kill a book

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

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

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

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. Every contribution keeps us accountable to you.

Support us

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The reputation flywheel

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

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

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

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

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

4. Someone has to pay for the truth

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

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

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

RSVP here to secure your slot

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

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

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

Here’s why we’re doing it this way.

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

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

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

Subscribe on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. Every contribution keeps us accountable to you.

Support us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSVP here to secure your slot

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

1. A challenging story

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

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

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

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

2. But what exactly is a canon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Big questions require big answers

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

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

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

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

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

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. Every contribution keeps us accountable to you.

Support us

4. Market forces

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSVP here to secure your slot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Communiqué has shaped how you see the industry, return the favour. Every contribution keeps us accountable to you.

Support us

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

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

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

RSVP here to secure your slot

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