When we announced the Communiqué IRL Global Tour, it was driven by the belief that the future of Africa’s media and creative economy will be shaped not only on the continent, but wherever Africans are building, creating, investing, and influencing industries around the world.

In June, we took that first giant step.

Our London edition marked Communiqué IRL’s first international gathering, and it became yet another reminder of why this work matters. We welcomed founders, executives, researchers, investors, and ecosystem builders from across Africa and the diaspora for an evening of thoughtful conversations, meaningful connections, and new collaborations.

This October, Communiqué IRL heads to New York City in partnership with Syracuse University’s Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Malindi Press and ChapterIP.

Together, we’re convening founders, investors, platform leaders, media executives, researchers, and policymakers to explore the evolution of the media and creator economy across Africa and the United States.

As Africa’s media and creative economy continues to mature, there has never been a more important time to strengthen connections between African and global ecosystems.

New York provides the perfect backdrop for exchanging ideas, building relationships, and exploring how creators, media companies, platforms, investors, and entrepreneurs can shape the industry’s next chapter together.

The evening will feature:

• An exclusive intelligence briefing on the state of Africa’s media and creator economy.

• A panel discussion exploring the future of media entrepreneurship, creator-led businesses, and cross-market collaboration.

• A curated networking reception designed to spark meaningful conversations and lasting connections.

Registration is now open. If you’re based in New York—or plan to be in the city this October—we’d love you to join us.

Seats are limited, so we encourage you to register early.

If you’re interested in partnering with us on this edition of Communiqué IRL, we’d love to hear from you at partnerships@communiquehq.com.

“Two days before the trip I was called and told, ‘Can you be in Nairobi in two days?’”

Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy was 26, a junior reporter at a Paris-based magazine called L’Autre Afrique, when the Office of the United Nations Secretary-General called. Kofi Annan was about to begin his first trip to Africa as Secretary-General, travelling to 10 countries across the continent. Muhutu-Remy had heard about the trip and called his office to ask if she could join the press contingent.

At first, she was dismissed. She was young, unknown, and working for a small publication. But the delegation was about to leave without much African representation in its press corps. Someone remembered the junior reporter who had asked to come. So, with barely any notice, she packed.

That instinct to ask even when the obvious answer is no has shaped much of Muhutu-Remy’s career. Over three decades, she has moved from journalism into media sales, entertainment distribution, global content deals, technology partnerships and music streaming. She has worked at Reuters, Viacom, Disney, and Meta. Today, she is Managing Director, Sub-Saharan Africa for Spotify.

On paper, the moves can look unexpected. In her own telling, they connect to a much older idea: Africa should be able to tell fuller stories about itself.

Muhutu-Remy was born in Ethiopia to a Rwandan mother and Burundian father. Her mother worked at the Organisation of African Unity, now the African Union. The institution was not just her mother’s workplace; it was part of Muhutu-Remy’s childhood.

They lived close to it. Her family doctor was there. She spent time in its corridors and compounds, surrounded by people from across the continent. At school and at home, she met people from different countries, languages, and cultures. She learned to read from the reports her mother brought home: documents on human rights, development projects, and the Pan-African project. But beyond her corner of the world, Ethiopia was living through a brutal communist regime. She also remembers the famine coverage that came to define the country internationally in the 1980s. “The only thing the world could talk about with regard to Ethiopia was the famine, when the picture on the ground was actually much more nuanced.”

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When the time came to choose a career, Muthu-Remy’s options were relatively limited. Diplomacy, journalism, or conference interpreting were the obvious paths, and at first, the latter won. “I wanted to become a conference interpreter. It was a very common job around me. People were either translators or conference interpreters. And that was really the Holy Grail: to become one.” After receiving an OAU scholarship to study in France, she started a programme in French, English, and Spanish literature, preparing for a career in interpretation.

Then she saw what the work would demand. “Conference interpreting was a very lonely job,” she says. “You travel all the time; you go from conference to conference.” Two years in, she decided to switch to journalism. It made more sense; the press had always been around her. As a child, she read magazines like Jeune Afrique and The Economist. She listened to the BBC and Voice of America. She was curious about politics, geopolitics, and the world beyond her immediate environment. Writing came naturally too; she graduated from high school with the top mark in writing.

She applied to journalism school and passed the competitive entrance examination. There, as the only black student, she imagined covering French politics for a major newspaper or broadcaster. Her professors and classmates suggested African publications instead. She recalls their advice: “That’s more suitable for you.” L’Autre Afrique nevertheless offered work she wanted to do. She wanted to cover the continent beyond familiar headlines and stereotypes. There, Muhutu-Remy began to see “narrative change” as more than an abstract idea.

Then came the Kofi Annan trip. For Muhutu-Remy, the most difficult stop was Rwanda, four years after the genocide. Annan’s role at the UN during that period made the visit emotionally charged. The delegation was not warmly received. For a young journalist with personal ties to Rwanda, it was a painful and defining experience.

After France, she and her fiancé, now her husband, decided to move to Nairobi. They worked as freelancers before she joined Reuters.

At Reuters, she first worked on Africa Journal, an English-language television programme adapted for French-speaking audiences. She translated and helped produce stories before becoming a reporter and producer. The role let her work across the continent. Reuters had the resources to send reporters to places many African newsrooms could not easily reach. It also taught her how to manage freelancers and stringers remotely: finding the right people, giving clear instructions, and turning material from different places into a coherent story.

For years, she was happy with her job, but then she began to notice the limits of her experience. She could report on the world while knowing little about the business practices that shaped the media industry. When a colleague working in sales at Reuters resigned, she saw her chance to understand the business of media.

She had never worked in sales. But she understood the product because she had helped make it. She knew the African media landscape through her reporting network. And she spoke French and English, useful in markets across the continent.

The transition was difficult. Suddenly, she was dealing with budgets, revenue targets, quarterly projections, and Excel spreadsheets. But the job gave her a new view of African media. She travelled constantly, meeting broadcasters, newspapers and other media companies.

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By her late thirties, she had a family and a settled life in Nairobi. She began to worry that comfort could become stagnation. “I knew nothing will happen if we stay in Nairobi,” she says. “We will continue doing the same things for another 10 years. Be happy for sure. But we needed discomfort. We needed the unknown.” She and her husband moved to South Africa.

There, she attended the first African Leadership Network conference in 2010 and met Alex Okosi, the current managing director of Google Africa, who was then working at Viacom. Among bankers, investors and consultants, they recognised each other as media people. In May 2011, he called about a distribution role at Viacom. The company needed someone to negotiate distribution agreements for MTV, MTV Base, and Nickelodeon across African markets. Muhutu-Remy knew news content, not entertainment. But the skills travelled.

At Viacom, she learned the entertainment business: licensing, contracts, negotiations, and distribution. The move later prepared her for Disney, where she worked on larger and more complex content deals involving major properties including Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. Disney gave her exposure to global entertainment deal-making. It also clarified what she needed from her work. At Reuters and Viacom, she felt African media and entertainment had something to prove. It wasn’t the same feeling at Disney. “I would never again do work where the desire to elevate Africa is not at the centre,” she says.

Facebook offered a route back to that purpose. The company was changing its relationship with news after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and was building a partnerships function. Muhutu-Remy’s experience across news and entertainment made sense for a role supporting African publishers and creators.

Her work included helping media organisations adapt to a changing digital environment. It also included creator partnerships, at a time when many African creators were building audiences but had limited ways to earn from them. In Nigeria, she pushed to make in-stream advertising available to creators. It was one of the most satisfying parts of her time there. “Seeing these people coming from all parts of Africa, but Nigeria in particular, really take on the opportunity,” she says, “that was my biggest satisfaction.”

Then Spotify came calling. The streaming platform had only just launched in Africa. To Muhutu-Remy, Spotify was initially just a global company she admired from afar. She wasn’t even thinking about working for it. The recruitment process lasted through eight or nine interviews. As she spoke about the creative economy and the challenges facing African markets, she began to see the possibility.

The role required breadth. Spotify was building its African operation after the pandemic. There was no office yet, and even the legal structure was still being set up. Muhutu-Remy needed to move between compliance, people management, contracts, marketing, artist support, business targets, and local partnerships. She sees that range as one of her strengths.

At Spotify, her work has centred on two connected goals: helping take African music to the world, and helping build habits of legal music consumption through streaming across the continent. Spotify’s arrival has coincided with a period of extraordinary global growth for African music, especially Afrobeats. The company has also invested in local teams, local payment methods, events and artist programmes. “We are really pushing this startup called Spotify Africa,” she says. “We are building it for ourselves.”

Her thinking now extends beyond music. She is increasingly interested in the infrastructure that supports creative work: royalty systems, regulation, standard recording codes and the systems that help artists track and receive income.

She is also thinking about artificial intelligence.

Her concern is that AI systems may reproduce a narrow view of Africa because so much available information about the continent is framed through development, crisis, or aid. Plenty of information exists about water access, for example. But far less exists about the everyday lives of urban Africans: loneliness, changing family structures, work, leisure, and new social habits. “If you want information about water access in Africa, you’ll find quite a bit,” she says. “But that is because that comes from a development angle.”

For Muhutu-Remy, the next chapter may still be part of the same story. The platforms may change. The industries may change. But the question remains: who gets to define Africa, and with what information?

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1. Afrobeats heads to Toronto

On the evening of August 28, Nigeria’s music, entertainment and media communities gathered at the Canadian Deputy High Commission in Lagos for The Headies: Road to Toronto, an event announcing the next international chapter of Nigeria’s most prominent music awards. After being held in Atlanta twice in 2022 and 2023, the biggest night in Nigerian music was moving again—this time to Toronto.

Toronto, however, is not an entirely new frontier for Nigeria’s creative industries. Increasingly, the city is becoming an overseas base from which Nigerian music, film, and other forms of entertainment can reach audiences across Canada and the wider North American market.

In Communiqué 107, we reported on Snag Productions, a Canadian film distribution company helping African films find a home in North American cinemas. Its strategy is to take films that had already found audiences in Nigeria and other African markets and help them reach African audiences abroad through theatrical releases in Canada and the United States. “For now, Snag Productions’ strategy is still in its early stages. But the first results suggest that the experiment may be working. When Behind The Scenes sold more than 8,000 tickets, it generated over $140,000 in box office revenue. Toyin Abraham’s Oversabi Aunty also found an audience, selling roughly 4,000 tickets and grossing more than $70,000 during its run,” we wrote.

So far, individual artists, promoters, and companies such as Snag Productions have driven much of this crossover. They have identified an audience and built their own routes into the Canadian market, often without a formal structure connecting the creative industries of both countries. But the Canadian government wants to change that. It is now taking an active interest in Nigeria’s creative economy and exploring partnerships across music, film, animation, and other parts of the sector. Through these relationships, Canada wants to move from being simply a destination for Nigerian creativity to becoming an active business and investment partner, using the creative economy to build stronger ties between both countries.

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2. Connective tissue

Following the success of the Headies’ two editions in Atlanta, Carlos Rojas-Arbulú, Canada’s deputy high commissioner in Lagos, sat down with Headies founder Ayo Animashaun in late 2024 to discuss how they could bring the awards to Canada. The conversation began over coffee with a “what if?” — What if the Headies could build on its experience in Atlanta and establish another international base in Toronto?

The awards are one expression of a broader position the Canadian mission has taken on Nigeria’s creative sector. “The strategy that we have at the High Commission in Abuja, and here at the Deputy High Commission, is that we intentionally decided to focus on the creative industries because we understand that the creative sector is a vector for economic development,” Rojas-Arbulú told Communiqué. “We accept the notion that many of these film directors or musicians or companies behind those are in many instances themselves business people who are looking for opportunities to grow their business and also to collaborate and extend partnerships to other sectors of society.” This means engaging Nigerian creatives not only as artists but also as founders, employers, and investors. A musician travelling to Canada for a performance may also have interests in technology, hospitality, agriculture or energy. A filmmaker attending a festival may be searching for distributors, investors, or production partners. Canada’s emerging strategy is to use these moments to connect them with Canadian companies and institutions.

Music is only the latest part of that effort. Film has been one of the Canadian government’s most consistent points of engagement with Nigeria’s creative economy. Over the last five or six years, the mission has organised four delegations of Nigerian filmmakers to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which has become Nollywood’s most reliable window into North America. Nigeria’s presence in the programme grew from a single film in 2022 to five in 2025, before settling at three in 2026. Those selections have included some of the most celebrated Nigerian films of the period: Biyi Bandele’s Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman, Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way, Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, the Esiri brothers’ Clarissa, and EbonyLife’s adaptation of Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, selected for this year’s festival ahead of its Nigerian release in December. Toronto also hosts the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival, where commercial Nollywood titles screen for the diaspora.

These appearances do different jobs for the films involved. Some arrive in Toronto for their world premieres, while others use the festival to secure North American attention, meet buyers, or build momentum ahead of their commercial releases. TIFF’s new industry market could make that commercial role even more important by creating a formal space for acquisitions, sales and investment.

Canada has also applied the same thinking to food. The Deputy High Commission has twice hosted Toronto-based food creator Raquel Fox, the founder of Island Girl Foods, in Nigeria. Island Girl Foods began exploring conversations with Nigerian partners to help distribute its Canadian products and expand production to Nigeria, including the possibility of operating from one of Lagos’s free zones.

Canada has also set its sights on animation. It already has a globally recognised animation industry, with production clusters in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, benefiting from a deep pool of artists, specialist training programmes, and production companies like Nelvana, Mercury Filmworks, and Jam Filled Entertainment, which have experience delivering work for global entertainment businesses. The Canadian government wants to matchmake these studios with Nigerian animation studios. “We’re trying to see how we can better connect the dots with technology and creativity. For instance, with animation, we have great companies out of Montreal, Vancouver and Victoria. And I think that’s probably the next round. We have to get to the place where we have clearly outlined what our pool of companies is and how we better match them with those Nigerian companies that are looking for partners, investors, and a certain level of expertise,” Rojas-Arbulú said.

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3. Reverse cultural diplomacy

When governments use the creative industries as a diplomatic tool, the most familiar model is outward-facing. A country exports its music, films, fashion and other cultural products to build influence abroad. South Korea’s use of K-pop, television and film to strengthen its global image is perhaps the most commonly cited example.

But cultural diplomacy can also work in the opposite direction. Instead of just exporting its own culture, a country can position itself as a platform for another country’s creative industry. It can open its stages, festivals, institutions, funding programmes, and business networks to foreign creators. The visiting creatives gain access to new audiences and markets, while the host country builds goodwill and develops commercial relationships with an influential industry it did not create.

France’s engagement with Africa’s creative industries offers one of the clearest examples of how this can evolve. In July 2018, during a visit to the New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans for an African cultural season in France. Macron promised that the programme would introduce French audiences to contemporary African fashion, film, music and art, with African professionals shaping how the continent was presented.

The result was the Africa2020 Season. Originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed by the pandemic, the programme eventually ran from December 2020 until September 2021 under Senegalese curator N’Goné Fall. It was designed to invite French audiences to understand the world from an African perspective. The season extended beyond conventional exhibitions and performances. Its programme covered art, science, technology, entrepreneurship and education, with projects developed jointly by African professionals and French institutions. According to the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Africa2020 included more than 1,500 events across 81 French cities and attracted over four million spectators. Building on the success of Africa2020, the French government launched Création Africa, a programme to move the relationship closer to investment and market access.

Institut Français runs Création Africa on behalf of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, funded through the Fonds Équipe France Création, and delivered with the AFD, Expertise France, Bpifrance, and the French cultural network on the continent. Where Africa2020 was a season, Création Africa is a pipeline: it covered 16 priority countries at launch in 2023 and 33 by 2024, including Nigeria, and it finances work across fashion, audiovisual, music, gaming, esports, comics and contemporary art. Unlike a cultural festival organised primarily for an audience, Création Africa was designed to bring African creative businesses into the same rooms as French investors, institutions, and potential commercial partners. The first forum took place in Paris and drew more than 600 participants. They included 323 African guests from 35 countries and representatives from 80 French companies.

The second forum moved from Paris to Lagos in October 2025. Organised in collaboration with the Lagos State Government and Nigeria’s Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, it brought together more than 1,000 participants from over 40 African countries and Europe. Across three days, the forum hosted roundtables, masterclasses, concerts, and pitching sessions, including a showcase of the Lagos x Paris Fashion and Design Accelerator. The Fashion and Design Accelerator provided Nigerian brands with several months of training and support as they prepared to enter international markets.

Canada is still at the beginning of this journey. Unlike France, it does not yet have a Création Africa-style programme that combines cultural exchange with funding, training, and structured access to investors and markets. What it has is growing demand for Nigerian culture, a large diaspora, established film connections and a government that now sees creative industries as part of its economic relationship with Nigeria.

The Headies will therefore be an important test. Its Toronto edition can prove that a Nigerian cultural event can create opportunities beyond ticket sales, performances, and publicity. But the deeper measure of success will be the partnerships, investments and market access that survive after the ceremony ends.

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Did you know selling 10,000 copies of a book is more than enough to earn you bestseller status in Nigeria?

With figures that low, it’s no surprise why publishing in the country is often described as an industry with too many problems and not enough money. Distribution is fragmented, purchasing power is weak, and piracy is an issue that never seems to go away.

Yet, there are numbers like these: 25,000 copies of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count were sold in Nigeria within days of release, while Femi Otedola’s Making It Big sold 16,000 copies in Nigeria and another 4,000 in the UK within three weeks.

These figures might look like isolated successes. But dig deeper, and you find that the same publisher was behind both. Then the question becomes how one publisher managed to sell books at this scale in such dire market conditions.

That publisher is Narrative Landscape, and in this episode of Creative Capital, we break down the decisions that helped turn it from being just a boutique publishing outfit into one of Nigeria’s most interesting publishing businesses.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How the founders used publishing services as a low-risk way to finance their business before moving into traditional publishing.

• The value of accruing relationship capital in the African book publishing industry.

• Why Narrative Landscape treats book launches as 360-degree marketing experiences.

• How the company worked around Nigeria’s broken distribution infrastructure using independent bookstores and direct-to-consumer fulfilment.

Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

“I realised I love art. I love creative stuff, but I was not a very good artist.”

Sam Onyemelukwe made that discovery during his first two years at the University of Southern California. He had chosen Fine Arts because he loved drawing, jewellery, and making things. But art school placed his work alongside that of people with gifts he knew he lacked.

He could have walked away from creativity. Instead, he looked for another way to remain close to it. Whenever Onyemelukwe reached the limits of what he could do as an artist or musician, he found that he was better at building the machinery around the work. “I’m more creative as a businessman,” he says.

It took him from computer graphics and Disney to a clothing company, a rap collective, a Nigerian record label, MTV and, eventually, TRACE. Together, the moves became an education in how creative businesses are built. Today, Onyemelukwe is one of the main reasons the TRACE brand became synonymous with African music. He was instrumental in pushing it out of a single generalist channel into genre-specific arms like TRACE Naija and TRACE Gospel. But his journey to this converging point is much wilder and more winding than this role might initially suggest.

Onyemelukwe was born in Lagos in 1971, the youngest of three children. His father rose from a village childhood to become the first Nigerian chief electrical engineer at the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria. His American mother came to Nigeria with the Peace Corps in 1962. They met and built their life in the country.

At Hillcrest School in Jos, Onyemelukwe studied with Nigerians and the children of missionaries from around the world. When he had to leave for the United States at about 16, he was heartbroken. America was not completely unfamiliar; his mother was from there, and he had lived there briefly as a child, but it changed how other people saw him. Some Black Americans treated him as white; some white Americans treated him as Black. In Nigeria, people called him Oyinbo.

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He found a place among the creative students. He grew dreadlocks and was given unusual freedom by a father who had tread a more conventional path. Years later, his father admitted that some friends thought he was mad to allow it. “Secretly, I felt like the cool dad because I had this cool son,” he told him.

His father carried that same openness into Onyemelukwe’s decision to study Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. He did not necessarily know what his son would do with an arts degree, but he trusted that he would find his way.

At USC, Onyemelukwe came to a difficult conclusion. He loved drawing, making things, and working with his hands. As a child, he had made jewellery and crafts with his mother. But he could also see the gap between his own work and that of peers who were likely to become exceptional professional artists.

“I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t draw,” he says. “I looked at some of my friends’ work, and I was like, ‘Guy!’”

Instead of walking away from art, he changed the way he engaged with it. USC allowed students to create independent-study courses, so Onyemelukwe proposed one focused on computer graphics. His plan was simple: travel around Los Angeles and meet artists working with computers. At the time, he did not know much about computers. He was not a programmer and had no deep technical background. But he sensed there was something worth exploring.

For his final project, he made a portrait pixel by pixel on an early Apple program. The image was less than an inch wide, but when enlarged, it resembled an impressionist painting. More importantly, the project led him to an artist who knew someone at Disney running post-production and looking for an intern. A few weeks later, Onyemelukwe was working there.

The opportunity did not become a career in Hollywood. Onyemelukwe had taken classes at USC’s film school as a student and worked on student productions, sometimes handling production design, but discovered that he disliked movie sets. Not long after, a friend who was starting a clothing line asked him to create a digital catalogue. Doing that led him to take a larger role within the company, and he left Disney.

Music was developing alongside this work. Onyemelukwe played bass in Dark Leaf, part of a Los Angeles rap scene that included groups such as Jurassic 5 and the Black Eyed Peas. “The funny thing is I actually also wasn’t very good at bass guitar. In fact, if anything, my better instrument should have been percussion drums. But I played it in bands with friends. At that point, it’s not always about being the best instrumentalist in the band.” But he did not need to become the star to understand the opportunity around the music. He wanted to help make it and build a business around it.

That opportunity arrived through his elder brother, China Onyemelukwe, a finance executive who also loved music. The brothers and their friends started DKG Music. One of their early acts was KUSH, the Nigerian gospel group made up of Lara George, TY Bello, Emem Ema, and Dapo Torimiro. “The idea that we had was to bring KUSH to the US and take them to perform in churches and sell CDs in front of churches at $10 a piece.”

Before doing that, however, they needed to create demand at home. Onyemelukwe returned to Lagos to build the group’s image and audience. His earlier experiments suddenly became useful. Friends from the clothing business helped create KUSH’s graphics and branding. Onyemelukwe worked on the video for “Let’s Live Together,” sourcing archival footage of the Nigerian Civil War from NTA. Then he spent six to eight months pushing the group onto television and live stages. The video entered heavy rotation on NTA, AIT, and Silverbird, while KUSH headlined some of MTN’s earliest Yellow Fests.

The American tour never happened. One member could not travel because her mother wanted her to remain in school, and the plan unravelled. The disappointment strained relationships, but the months in Lagos gave him a working knowledge of Nigeria’s entertainment industry. He now had an unusual combination of experience. He understood the American entertainment industry, but he also knew the Nigerian market and the people who could make an international media company work locally.

That trait was quite important to Alex Okosi, who at the time was putting together a team to establish MTV Africa. “Me, Alex, and somebody in the industry that’s around till today had a meeting. Towards the end of the meeting, the guy was laughing, and he said, ‘Alex, this is your guy.’” Okosi hired him. Onyemelukwe spent the next year and seven months helping set up the systems and sell the network’s channels to local television operators.

After MTV Africa, Onyemelukwe was looking for his next move. TRACE, then best known as a French music channel, appeared to have a larger opportunity in Anglophone Africa. Onyemelukwe found an employee’s number on the company website and called. She tried to arrange a conversation with the founder, but weeks passed without a meeting. So he bought a ticket to Paris. He had one day in the city and managed to arrange lunch with TRACE’s chief operating officer and several executives. He pitched a larger commercial and cultural presence in Anglophone Africa. By the end, he felt he had won them over.

Rather than accept a job, Onyemelukwe founded Venator Partners to handle advertising and sponsorship sales for TRACE and other media clients. In 2011, the company secured the master licence for TRACE in Anglophone West Africa. As the TRACE business grew, Venator focused more of its attention on it, helping to localise the brand and develop channels, including TRACE Naija and TRACE Gospel.

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The partnership eventually became something more permanent. While TRACE was changing its shareholders, its co-founder, Olivier Laouchez, proposed bringing Venator fully into the group. TRACE acquired the company after negotiations. Onyemelukwe received an equity position and joined the group’s management.

Building TRACE Nigeria at scale presented a problem that Onyemelukwe’s previous ventures had not. He had run projects, but leading a team exposed how much he still had to learn. He carried a precise picture of how every task should be completed and constantly checked whether people had followed it. “I was stressed out all the time,” he says. He began studying performance management and putting clearer systems in place. The harder lesson was allowing people to produce good work in ways different from his own. It took years, but the organisation slowly became less dependent on his presence. “Life became a lot easier.”

Now Onyemelukwe wants to apply that experience beyond TRACE. He sees creative entrepreneurs with strong ideas but little experience building investable companies, and investors who want exposure to entertainment but struggle to find their way into it. “I want to be a bridge between the creative community and investors,” he says.

He is also interested in the work required to strengthen Nigeria’s creative economy: management systems, capital, intellectual property and coordination between business and government. He points to South Korea, which spent decades developing its cultural industries. Nigeria cannot repeat that path, but he believes the private sector can build more of the missing structure while engaging the government where possible.

It is the same problem Onyemelukwe has been solving since art school. He may not be the person painting the picture, playing the bass line, or standing at the front of the stage. His skill is seeing what the creative work needs around it, then finding the people, money and systems to help it travel.

He never became the artist he wanted to be. Instead, he became an operator, and one could argue the industry needed this version of him more.

1. Inception

I spent the last week in Kigali at the Africa Creative Economy Investment Forum, where Communiqué was an ecosystem partner. Alongside the main programme, we ran a Communiqué IRL event in partnership with Africa in Colours, and I sat on a panel with Deborah Oguike, who leads events and partnerships at Communiqué, and Raoul Rugamba of Africa in Colours. We discussed how to build a viable investment ecosystem for Africa’s creative economy. During that conversation, I shared a thesis I’ve been ruminating on for a while now.

It is clear that Africa’s creative economy has a massive investment gap, but that gap isn’t really about (a lack of) available capital. It’s about the size and destination of said capital. On one end, you have small cheques, the $20,000 to $100,000 range that come through grants and, now, some small-scale investment funds. These are genuinely useful, but nowhere near enough on their own to form durable enterprises. On the other end sit the big tickets, the $10 million and above that DFIs and their vehicles are built to write, which is simply bigger than what most enterprises in this ecosystem can absorb right now. And in between those two ends, there’s a wide stretch of companies in limbo.

A few people in the audience corroborated the point from their own experience. One founder talked about how many companies had outgrown the available grant programmes but weren’t remotely close to what a $2 million cheque would require of their business. Those companies, we agreed, are stuck in the gap, and that gap needs to be closed for the ecosystem’s sake.

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2. Demand, partially fixed. Supply, not really

In her book Creative Cash Flow, Marie Lora-Mungai, who has spent close to two decades in the industry and now advises the DFIs in this space, makes the point that there is more capital circulating in African creative industries today than there are investment-ready businesses to absorb it. Afreximbank, the World Bank and IFC, the African Development Bank, Agence Française de Développement, and a growing list of private investors have all repositioned themselves around the sector in the last three years. The demand side of the equation, which involves making capital available to the market, has been partially addressed. What remains unsolved, and painfully so, is the size and delivery style of that capital.

We need to make that distinction clear because it changes the kinds of problems we discuss.

If this were a policy problem, the fix would be lobbying governments to change tax regulations or tighten IP laws and systems (spoiler alert: a lot of them are already doing this). If it were purely an awareness problem, the fix would be more advocacy through panels, reports, and roundtables to convince investors that this sector is worth their money. But look at the list of names above again: Afreximbank, the World Bank, IFC, AfDB, AFD. They don’t need much more convincing. The awareness problem is mostly behind us. The policy conversations are already happening, however slowly.

What is left is a twofold issue. The first part is that too much of the available capital is designed for market dynamics that don’t yet exist. The second is that even when the cheque sizes are right (and many of them are), the manner in which they are disbursed isn’t quite so.

3. Hard truths

Take CANEX Creations Inc, the intellectual property investment subsidiary of FEDA, Afreximbank’s equity arm. On paper, the thesis — which is to commercialise African IP across film, music, fashion, and sport, in a continent producing more culturally significant work than it currently captures value from — makes sense. In Communiqué 121, I said, “[CCInc’s] vision is coherent and generous, but it also relies heavily on several other actors to play their roles.” Part of that is what this essay explores.

CCInc is already deploying capital. For instance, it has an equity stake in talent monetisation platform C.R.E.A.M and a co-investment in the feature film Clarissa, which NEON picked up for worldwide distribution. But all of this exists on top of a market where copyright enforcement is inconsistent, and collection societies barely function in most countries where they exist at all. Afreximbank has pledged $2 billion for the broader CANEX platform through 2027, plus a separate $1 billion film debt vehicle. So, in this context, for CCInc to succeed in the long run, it needs companies and platforms whose value proposition is to enable and simplify IP protection, distribution, and monetisation. But CCInc’s investment ecosystem cannot accommodate many such companies right now, because they would first need to show significant traction beyond the seed investment stage.

The same problem shows up in the DFI-scale funds writing bigger cheques. AfDB’s iDICE programme launched in 2023 with a $618 million budget and a projected $6.4 billion economic impact, targeting more than 200 tech and creative startups in Nigeria. IFC has stated an ambition to invest $1 billion a year in creative industries across emerging markets. Commitments at that scale come with tickets typically starting at $10 million. The vast majority of African creative businesses, at the moment, do not have the capacity to absorb even $1 million. That is the missing middle that we need to figure out. But what does that look like?

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4. Readiness Capital, and a leaf from the MDIF’s playbook

The solution, I believe, is providing what I call “Readiness Capital.” This, I define, as capital structured to make a company investable, not one that assumes it already is. There’s already a lot of the latter in existence, and not enough of the former.

Readiness Capital operates through two arms: a development arm that gets a company to the point where it can absorb the right capital, and an investment arm that writes the cheque once the company is actually ready. An organisation that embodies this concept is the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF)*.

A few weeks ago, MDIF published its 2025 year-in-review, marking thirty years of operation. I’m referencing that report because it’s the closest thing I’ve found to a working blueprint for what Africa’s creative economy actually needs: Readiness Capital actually working, at scale, over several years.

The numbers are interesting. By the end of 2025, MDIF held $119 million in assets under management across 56 companies in 31 countries. Since 1996, it has deployed $280 million in loans and equity across 159 companies in 50 countries, recovered $146 million of that principal, and returned $134 million to investors, with a 100% on-time repayment rate and a 10% write-off rate. MDIF’s chief strategy officer, Patrice Schneider, makes the case in the report that independent information is investable and deserves to be financed for sustainability rather than mere survival, and that where commercial capital has entered the sector, it has too often come at the cost of independence. MDIF’s answer, in his words, is a third path in which philanthropic and public capital absorb early risk and give commercial investors the confidence to come in afterwards. By the end of 2025, 56 investors and donors had bought into that approach.

That structure, more than the money, is Readiness Capital in practice, and it’s what I think actually works for Africa’s creative economy. On the one hand, there’s a development strategy that doesn’t hand out grants and hope for the best. It runs programmes that give companies room to experiment, fail, and learn, then iterate, providing a way out of the missing middle. The investment arm would then back some of those companies once they’re ready for capital they can actually absorb.

I’m not selling this as a silver bullet, though. Readiness Capital is difficult to fundraise for, because it asks investors to accept a lower return ceiling in exchange for lower risk and real impact. That pitch doesn’t excite the LPs who came to Africa’s creative economy in search of unicorn stories. It’s also operationally heavier than a pure investment fund. Running in-house development programmes requires headcount and patience that most fund structures aren’t built for, and results show up slowly, which is a hard sell to anyone reporting to a board on an annual cycle.

I also want to be careful not to oversell what a single fund like this could do. It will not fix the entire ecosystem on its own. MDIF took thirty years and a global vision to get where it is, and even then it operates across 56 companies, not 5,600. One fund running on Readiness Capital here would move the needle for its own portfolio and prove the concept, not solve the sector’s supply problem by itself. But imagine if multiple funds adopted this approach? That would be a game changer.

Another major risk is impatience. There’s every likelihood that this model will be tried once, judged against unrealistic return expectations by year three, and written off as proof that Readiness Capital doesn’t work here. That lesson would be wrong and drawn far too early. Again, it took MDIF three decades to compound. This model needs time to work.

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5. More real-life examples

None of this is hypothetical. HEVA Fund in Kenya, Africa’s first dedicated creative industry fund and one that Communiqué has written about before, has mobilised more than $40 million for over 300 creative businesses in East Africa over the past decade, writing cheques suited to the businesses that actually exist. Its shared-risk lending arrangement with NCBA Bank, where the two jointly evaluate applicants and structure loan terms around the irregular, project-based income typical in creative work, is close to a blueprint for what a mainstream lender partnering with a specialist fund should look like.

There’s also a live example unfolding right now that I think is worth examining. In May, IFC and Zaria Group, the pan-African sports and entertainment company co-founded by Masai Ujiri, announced a partnership to develop sports and entertainment districts across African cities, starting with Nairobi, building on Zaria’s work in Kigali, where it operates BK Arena, Amahoro Stadium, and the newer Zaria Court complex next door. BK Arena has hosted the Basketball Africa League finals since the league launched, and the model Zaria and IFC are now trying to replicate in Nairobi is essentially that Kigali template. That, in a way, is Readiness Capital taking shape.

6. Final notes

Nobody in this ecosystem is short on ambition: not the investors, not the entrepreneurs. CANEX has pledged $2 billion. iDICE is carrying a $618 million mandate. IFC wants to write a billion dollars a year, and it’s already testing what patient, platform-level capital looks like through its bet on Zaria Group. Those are not small commitments, and I don’t think the people behind them are wrong. (Who am I to say so?) But I think the sequencing could be better and more realistic. Most of these investment strategies are not optimised for market realities. And until more funds are willing to go against the grain, adopt something closer to Readiness Capital, and build in the missing middle, much of the available capital will be wasted or remain exactly where it is now: announced in press releases, searching for the right takers, but hanging in the balance because it is incompatible with too many parts of the market.

You are welcome to disagree.

*Disclosure: Communiqué is part of MDIF’s ecosystem. We are recipients of a grant, and that relationship is ongoing.

Building a media preservation project is a great undertaking. Sustaining it is even greater. But Archivi.ng seems to have done this really well, especially given that building a media company on the continent is quite hard. How, you may ask?

The reason may come down to something simple: Archivi.ng was never built behind closed doors. It was built in full view of everyone, and that simple fact might be the truest reason behind its success. But what does “building in public” actually mean here? Starting an idea from a single tweet or a personal observation is a well-worn genre by now, but this story deserves a closer look for the lessons it actually offers.

In this episode of Creative Capital, we break down the decisions that turned one man’s obsession with the past into one of Africa’s most important archival and media projects.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How a frustrated search for historical context turned into a mission to digitise 18,627 days of Nigerian newspapers.

• How a leaked manifesto and a chain of favours unlocked the funding, publisher deal, and registration Archivi.ng needed to exist.

• Why archives alone don’t change anything, and how Archivi.ng’s Fellowship and editorial arm turned raw history into usable insight, including as a source for African-context AI training data.

Watch the full episode on YouTube here.

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?

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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