1. Creative tech meets VC

Last week, Aries Media Ventures announced its first venture capital fund to invest in early-stage media technology startups. The fund launched in Africa, where it made its first three investments: Aktivate, a creator marketing platform; HustleSasa, an events commerce platform; and Book Mahali, a venue-booking and hospitality platform. Aries’s focus is on technology supporting industries such as film, music, television, gaming, sports and live entertainment, rather than financing content directly.

For Alykhan Kaba, Aries’s founding general partner, the fund culminates an ambition that began more than two decades ago. Kaba has spent much of his career working at some of the world’s largest entertainment companies, including Live Nation, Activision Blizzard, Entertainment One, and NBCUniversal. During those years, he became increasingly interested in opportunities outside the industry’s established markets, particularly in regions that global entertainment companies had paid little attention to.

With Aries, Kaba bets that his experience in more developed entertainment markets can help emerging market startups access the capital, industry knowledge, and commercial relationships they need to grow. He believes a gap exists between African entrepreneurs building promising media technology businesses and investors who understand how these businesses operate. Aries’s model also depends on global entertainment companies eventually buying the businesses it backs.

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2. The long walk

Growing up, Alykhan Kaba was fascinated by entertainment. He loved watching television shows, movies, and cartoons; playing video games; and reading magazines. He imagined spending his life working in the industry, but struggled to reconcile that ambition with his desire to do something meaningful. Like many children raised in immigrant households, he grew up around the expectation that a successful career meant becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer. Entertainment, by comparison, seemed frivolous.

His understanding of the industry’s importance began to change after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Kaba was 11 years old and growing up in a Muslim household in the United States. In the years that followed, he noticed how the news portrayed Muslim beliefs and attitudes towards issues such as gender equality and religion, often in ways that differed from his own experiences. It made him realise how much influence the media had over how people understood other cultures and communities, and how those narratives could have even greater consequences in less developed countries.

Kaba became interested in how media could contribute positively to society, particularly in developing countries. He wanted to work at the world’s leading entertainment companies, learn how the industry operated, and eventually apply that knowledge in underserved markets. “I want to spend the rest of my career learning as much as I can about the entertainment industry from the best companies in the world,” he recalled thinking, with the eventual goal of helping “develop the media ecosystem in parts of the world that are undercapitalised and underserved.”

That interest eventually took him to Afghanistan, where he interned at Roshan, a telecommunications company that produced programmes such as Afghan Star, a televised singing competition, and an Afghan adaptation of Sesame Street. For Kaba, the experience demonstrated how entertainment could challenge social conventions, create economic opportunities and contribute to society. After beginning his professional career at McKinsey, Kaba moved into corporate strategy roles at Live Nation, Activision Blizzard, and Entertainment One. Until recently, he served as vice president of content strategy at NBCUniversal, where his team evaluated and planned unscripted television programmes, including Love Island, The Traitors and The Real Housewives franchise.

But while working at these companies, Kaba noticed that their international strategies focused largely on the United States and Western Europe. They often grouped markets outside these regions into a broad category, the rest of the world, with little attention to their individual characteristics and opportunities. He realised the role he had imagined for himself, helping major entertainment companies expand into emerging markets, didn’t exist as he had hoped.

Around 2021, Kaba began using his holidays to travel to countries including India, Tanzania, Kenya, Tajikistan, and Turkey. Before each trip, he contacted entrepreneurs building promising businesses in the creative industries but struggling to attract investment. Local venture capital firms largely prioritised sectors such as fintech, agriculture, and healthcare, while international media investors often lacked the knowledge and relationships needed to invest in emerging markets. In 2023, he launched Aries Media Project, a professional network connecting these entrepreneurs with investors, executives, and industry experts in global entertainment centres such as Los Angeles, New York, and London. Drawing on relationships from his career, he introduced founders to people at major media companies who could advise them on their businesses.* Over three years, the network grew to more than 1,000 entrepreneurs across over 40 countries, roughly half of whom were based in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Over time, Kaba began to see that the relationships he had built through Aries Media Project could serve a larger purpose. Beyond connecting founders with industry experts, he believed his experience and understanding of emerging markets put him in a position to identify and invest in promising businesses himself. “If you are experienced enough in the industry and you are culturally aware enough to know what questions to ask and how to navigate the political and cultural landscape, you can actually make early bets with a relatively high level of conviction,” he told Communiqué.

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3. Aries’s case for creative tech

Aries is targeting $5 million for its first fund. Kaba has not disclosed how much it has raised, though the fund has already made three investments. It plans to invest in 40 to 50 startups over four years, writing initial cheques of up to $50,000 and up to $150,000 in follow-on investments for companies that show strong growth.

Much of the institutional financing that has entered Africa’s creative industries has gone into IP or creative infrastructure. In Nigeria, MBO Capital has primarily financed film productions, while Volition Capital established its VEMA investment pool to back The Black Book, Netflix’s most-watched Nollywood film. CANEX Creations Inc., Afreximbank’s creative industry investment vehicle, has focused on commercialising African intellectual property while also supporting businesses addressing gaps in the industry’s infrastructure. But Aries is taking a different approach. Rather than investing directly in creative intellectual property or physical infrastructure, Aries focuses on the technology that supports the industry. Kaba believes these businesses are better suited to venture capital outcomes.

It is the right match. Investments in films, music catalogues, and other intellectual property can be profitable, but their returns don’t always meet venture capital investors’ expectations. Those investments often suit private equity or other financing arrangements better. A venture capital fund, by contrast, needs some portfolio companies to grow enough to return 50 or even 100 times the original investment.

For Aries, the numbers are demanding. A $50,000 cheque into a company valued at around $2.5 million buys roughly 2% of it. After two or three more funding rounds, that stake could fall to about 1%. Follow-on investments of up to $150,000 might double it in Aries’s best performers. Even then, a $100 million acquisition would return about $2 million, less than half the fund’s $5 million target.

That puts the weight of the thesis on acquisitions. Kaba points to HustleSasa, the Kenyan events commerce platform, as an example. Having worked at Live Nation, he believes the company’s ticketing and events technology resembles the kinds of businesses the global entertainment giant could acquire as it expands into new markets, and at a price that could give the fund outsized returns.

Beyond providing capital, Aries intends to support its portfolio companies through Kaba’s relationships across the global entertainment industry by connecting founders with executives at international media companies, offering advice on product development and expansion, and helping them understand the commercial opportunities available in larger markets. “I’ll never be the person to write you the biggest cheque,” Kaba told Communiqué, “but I can be a strategic investor in a way that I think other investors may not be able to.”

Kaba spent a decade waiting for the industry’s giants to take the road into markets like Lagos and Nairobi. They didn’t. Aries bets it can support the businesses those giants will one day want to acquire. The thesis is sound, but the arithmetic is brutal. At $50,000 a cheque, Aries needs a handful of its companies to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars in an industry that has produced very few exits of that size. Kaba’s network can open doors at Live Nation and NBCUniversal. But time will tell whether anyone on the other side of those doors is ready to pay for an acquisition worth waiting for.

*Disclosure: Communiqué has previously benefited from introductions made through the Aries Media Project network. Communiqué has no financial relationship with Aries Media Ventures.

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1. Accidentally on purpose

On October 8, Vincent Ehindero, a counsellor finished a therapy session and got paid. What made it unusual was where he had met his client: inside Lagos Life, the browser game that had taken over Nigerian social media.

Vincent the Therapist, as he is known online, joined the game on October 5. He explored the virtual city, then told people on X that a therapist was now available there, offering short sessions in exchange for in-game tokens. Messages followed. Some people wanted the free 15-minute sessions; others went on to book full ones. One client, he wrote on X, paid the balance in real naira into his OPay account.

Vincent told Communiqué that anonymity was part of the appeal. On WhatsApp, a client sees a phone number; on Zoom, a face or an email address. In Lagos Life, people could talk without revealing who they were. “I was trying to create this safe environment for them where they also want to speak, where they also want to tell their stories,” he said.

He says he has since received more than 300 messages and held more than 140 sessions, totalling over 2,000 minutes. More than 40 became paid sessions, and dozens of clients have subscribed.

For another player, the game has become a creative outlet. Dreamgirl, as she is known on X, joined on October 3 after seeing it all over her timeline. Sending large sums of in-game money around was part of the early fun. What kept her was decorating homes and building stories around her character’s life, which she turned into videos without appearing on camera, and without paying for locations, transport, or equipment.

Those videos have drawn some of the highest engagement on her account, she says, adding more than 1,000 followers within days after posting just two. She is now considering making money from content for gaming audiences. “If I had seen it as just any random game, I would have lost interest,” she said. “The ability for the game to be diverse, in the sense that you can interact with people, makes it really look like a real-life world, and that is what keeps me there.”

Vincent and Dreamgirl are using Lagos Life for more than play: one to meet clients, the other to build an audience. They are not the only ones finding commercial uses for it. In the same virtual city, businesses pay for billboards, Chowdeck appears on every character’s phone, musicians pay to have their songs played in clubs, and players buy in-game currency with real money. The game already supports several kinds of commercial activity, some its creator never intended.

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Shalom Rayhamen, the developer, started building Lagos Life at 9 pm on September 30 and released it at 7 am the next morning, Nigeria’s Independence Day. By October 8, it had recorded 4.3 million sign-ups, according to TechCabal. By October 10, Rayhamen said it had passed 7 million. She incorporated Vatar Inc. with two co-founders on October 6. Three days later, the company closed a $500,000 angel round at a $10 million valuation. Investors include Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola, through his fund Resilience17; Oo Nwoye; Terra Industries CEO Nathan Nwachuku; and Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan. Vatar says the round closed in a day. More investors are queuing for a chance to get on the cap table, according to well-placed sources.

The obvious question is whether Nigerian games can become commercially successful. But Lagos Life poses a more interesting one: what happens when a game starts functioning as a media business, a social platform, and potentially a marketplace?

Within days, Vatar attracted millions of registrations, secured paying commercial partners, and began hosting activities beyond conventional gameplay. These developments are related, but they are not the same achievement. A large audience does not automatically produce a profitable business, and a busy virtual world is not yet an economy. Lagos Life is an early test of whether all three can grow together.

2. The business within

Rayhamen told TechCabal that Lagos Life has five revenue streams, ranging from selling audience access to collecting money from players.

Businesses rent billboards and plots within the virtual city. Musicians pay to have their songs played in its clubs. Company deals, including Chowdeck’s presence on every character’s phone, bring sponsorship and brand integration into the game. Football streaming introduces a broadcasting-like activity, though its commercial potential depends on what is being streamed and whether the rights are in place. Players can also top up their in-game cash, putting Lagos Life in the market for virtual goods and microtransactions that sustain many free-to-play games.

These businesses share one environment, but each needs its own evidence of demand. Advertising depends on an audience brands want to reach. Music promotion depends on artists believing in-game exposure has value. Virtual purchases depend on players having reasons to spend. Streaming raises questions about rights and distribution.

Vatar says it has earned and contracted more than $170,000 since launch, up from about $46,900 in its first four days. It has not disclosed how that splits across the five streams, how much it has collected, or how much remains tied to signed agreements. Those distinctions matter: contracted revenue is not necessarily cash in the bank.

Even so, businesses have been willing to spend money on a product that barely existed two weeks earlier. What the figure does not yet tell us is whether that spending will recur, how much it costs Vatar to deliver what it sells, or whether launch-week interest can become a predictable stream of income.

The model suits Nigeria for a simple reason. An entry fee would shrink the audience in a market where consumers have many competing demands on their money. A free game can instead earn from business customers and from players who choose to spend.

But this is not simply the economics of a free newspaper or radio station transplanted into a game. Lagos Life gives commercial partners access to an environment where users spend time, interact, and make purchases. The longer-term opportunity is to build several income streams around that activity, rather than rely on a single advertising format.

The challenge is that five revenue streams don’t automatically diversify a business. If they all depend on the same burst of launch-week attention, they could weaken together. Vatar will need to show that each stream has a reason to exist after the headlines move on.

3. A recipe for attention

Lagos Life didn’t need a long marketing campaign. Its launch coincided with a moment when Nigerians were already discussing a similar game, and its distribution made it easy for that conversation to turn into deeper engagement.

Lagos Run, a danfo-themed browser game, had gone viral days earlier. Rayhamen saw it on X and built Lagos Life in response. People were already familiar with the idea of a Nigerian city turned into a game. Lagos Life gave them more to do and a much wider social world to explore.

Its browser format also helped. Players can follow a link and enter without downloading an app or freeing up phone storage. As WeeTracker has argued, access may have been what held Nigerian games back. Lagos Life supports that argument, though one viral hit cannot settle it.

Then there is the world Rayhamen built. The in-game clock follows Lagos time. Quilox and Amala Shitta appear on the map; players ride danfos, buy generators, pay rent, and start life with different levels of money and connections. These are not just background details. They give players a shared set of references for understanding the game and talking to one another.

The game has also attracted users beyond Nigeria. After Nigeria, the largest shares of sign-ups reportedly come from the US, the UK, Ghana, Canada and the Netherlands. For the diaspora, it offers a digital version of a place they know, rather than a fictional world they have to learn.

4. When players become the content

Vincent shows where Lagos Life could go next: a virtual city as a place to find clients. But the money he earned left the game through OPay, and Lagos Life earned nothing from the transaction. Dreamgirl’s story is similar. The game is her set, but the followers she gains belong to her own account, not to Vatar.

Rayhamen seems to see the opportunity. On October 10, she announced on X that Vatar would release APIs so developers can bring their games into Lagos Life, letting players “join with their existing accounts and spend their in-game money in your games.” If it works, Lagos Life becomes less a single game than a hub other games plug into, the way Roblox grew beyond its own titles. It also means Vatar would have to pay developers for what players spend, turning its in-game currency into something closer to a wallet, with all the questions about fees, payouts, and oversight that come with one.

A therapist finding clients and a player building an audience are small things. They are also the kind of signals platforms are built on.

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5. The investors’ gambit

A $500,000 round at a $10 million valuation is a striking outcome for a company incorporated three days earlier. It raises a fair question: what exactly are investors betting on?

The registration count alone cannot explain it. Investors are betting that the team can build on its first audience, grow the commercial relationships already in place, and create products people keep using. Lagos Life could expand into new cities and titles. The risk is that the cultural fluency that powered the first one won’t apply to other. Maybe it doesn’t need to.

Vatar has offered an early signal. A dashboard Rayhamen shared on October 10 showed 1.4 million people active the previous day, about one in five of everyone who had signed up. It is self-reported, and one day in launch week is not a habit. Still, it shows how quickly and deeply people took to the game.

There are precedents for digital worlds becoming valuable businesses. Viacom paid about $160 million for Neopets in 2005, and Disney paid $350 million upfront for Club Penguin in 2007, with more tied to performance. Both had established communities and proven commercial appeal. Their histories show what is possible, not what is guaranteed.

HQ Trivia offers a different lesson. It drew enormous attention and was once valued at nearly $100 million before shutting down in 2020. A product can dominate the conversation without building a lasting business.

Vatar is still at the beginning. Its reported earnings and contracted deals suggest commercial demand, but there isn’t enough data yet to judge whether the model is sustainable. The $10 million valuation reflects terms the company and its investors agreed to, not proof that the business will justify the price.

The bet, then, is on execution. Can Vatar turn a burst of attention into a product people come back to? Can it persuade businesses to renew? Can it build the systems a virtual economy needs without losing control of the experience? And can it stay culturally relevant once Lagos Life is no longer new?

If it can, this round may look like an early entry into a much larger opportunity. If the audience disappears as the novelty fades, the launch figures and the speed of the fundraise will matter far less.

Lagos Life has secured something no founder can guarantee in advance: a dominant place in the public conversation. The investment case now depends on how the company uses that social capital.

6. The anomaly

It is tempting to turn Lagos Life into a formula for Nigerian game development: build quickly, localise the experience, distribute via a link, and sell advertising inside it. That would be the wrong lesson.

The circumstances were unusually specific. A developer with nearly a decade of experience saw Lagos Run on X and built a new virtual world overnight while caring for her four-month-old baby. She released it on Independence Day, when many Nigerians were off work and online. The game arrived as people were already discussing a similar idea, businesses were willing to pay for access to the audience, and investors moved quickly.

Change those factors, and the outcome might have been very different. The game could have been well made and culturally resonant without reaching millions of people in its first week. That is part of what makes the success hard to reproduce.

Copycats illustrate the point. PH Lifestyle and London Red Bus adopted the format within days, but copying the mechanics does not recreate the audience, timing, or commercial relationships that helped Lagos Life take off. Code is only one part of a product’s success.

That does not make Lagos Life a one-off for Nigerian games. More hits will come, and some may build businesses that last longer or become more valuable. They may look nothing like this one, just as Lagos Life looks nothing like the danfo and okada games Nigerian studios have spent years building.

The opportunity is not for every developer to build a browser game or sell virtual billboards. It is about noticing where people already spend their attention, what they want to do together, and what existing products have failed to give them. The next successful game will likely come from a different audience, a different frustration, or a different cultural reference.

Lagos Life is an important case study, but not yet a proven formula. Its lasting significance will depend on whether Vatar can turn an extraordinary launch into a durable business, and whether other developers can learn from its success without simply trying to copy it.

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1. A meeting of great minds

All successful events are alike; each unsuccessful event is unsuccessful in its own way. For Bloomberg’s Africa Business Media Innovators, which has been running for ten years now, success comes from the quality of people and conversations it’s been able to pack in without much of it feeling like a chore. I followed the event as an outsider-slash-observer for a few years. 2026 was the first time I got to attend and experience it in person. It was great: a perfect balance between panels and networking sessions. Not too many, not too few.

My biggest takeaway was the depth of thought and innovation across Africa’s media landscape. For instance, I learned more about the work The Republic is doing with Atlas to protect IP and all kinds of creative work on the continent and globally. I learned about Trevor Struurman’s Manor Africa and how it is providing a multimedia platform for creatives in South Africa (and the continent) to experiment with new concepts, ranging from journals to magazines, events, and a bookstore. I also learned more about how BellaNaija is incorporating artificial intelligence into its work. It brought back Damilola Olatunji as Head of Monetised Content & AI Growth, and now fields an AI avatar that presents content on camera.

These are just a few of the people and projects I came across. It is encouraging to see how innovative the media ecosystem is, a sharp departure from the outlooks of doom and gloom that often overshadow conversations about African media.

This is not to say that there is nothing to worry about (we will get into some of that shortly), but there is so much to be optimistic about, as long as we, the people, continue to push forward with resilience, collaborate more often with one another, and think more deeply and deliberately about the future we want to see.

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2. Lessons to boot

As much as I enjoyed meeting people at ABMI, I also took away some valuable lessons for my publication and the ecosystem at large.

I. AI and distribution

Of course, we will start by talking about AI. It is unavoidable these days.

Two years ago, I would have bet heavily on newsletters as the future of media distribution. We built Communiqué on that bet, and it’s helped us grow quickly and distinctively. But I would be lying if I said the ground isn’t moving under all of us.

AI tools are now answering the questions our journalism and research used to answer, often using our content to do it. The readers get a summary, the AI platform gets the engagement, and we publishers get close to nothing in return. For newsrooms that already depended heavily on search and social for traffic, that is a serious threat.

That said, panic, however tempting, is the wrong response. Instead, we must stop depending on any single route to reach our readers. Present at ABMI were people building their own apps and chatbots trained on their archives, testing more newsletter verticals for specific audiences, hosting more frequent live events, big or small, and creating videos in every format and length their audience actually watches.

For us at Communiqué, the question going forward with every piece of content we put out is: Does it bring us closer to the reader, or does it put another layer between us? The goal is to expand how we reach people without giving up any ground we already hold.

II. AI and monetisation

One of the most compelling arguments I heard, on stage and in one-on-one conversations, was that African publishers need to be far more proactive about protecting their IP from AI crawlers. Yes, we want our work to be discovered. But discovery that only enriches the company doing the discovering is extraction.

When you look at who is pushing back on the big AI companies, you’ll find that almost every major lawsuit and licensing deal involves Western publishers. African publishers hesitate, and understandably so. On its own, a mid-sized newsroom in Lagos or Nairobi can’t just up and go against a trillion-dollar company. But together, players across the continent with decades of archives, a wealth of languages, and original reporting are much harder to ignore. This is where national or regional press and media coalitions can be more impactful: setting standards for what we allow crawlers to take, designing common licensing terms, and pooling legal and technical resources so that no publisher has to face this alone.

The idea that this “AI future” we are heading toward is inevitable is a fiction, sustained by heavy marketing spend. Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI does a good job of surfacing this.

III. The tension between legacy media and creators

For many media companies, creators represent a frightening future. Newsrooms bind themselves to professional ethics and editorial standards; creators answer mostly to their audiences. That doesn’t mean creators have no ethics. Many of the best ones hold themselves to standards some newsrooms should envy. But it explains why the relationship often looks like a tug of war when it really shouldn’t.

Each side has something the other badly needs. Legacy media, old and new, brings decades of professional practice: verification, accountability, and the patient work of building worlds readers can trust. Creators bring speed, irreverence, and an instinct for what audiences want and how they behave that most newsrooms still lack.

The audience does not care about our org charts. They move freely between a newspaper, a podcast, and a creator’s feed. The information ecosystem will be healthier when both sides stop treating each other as rivals and start working out where they can build together.

IV. Humans as taste makers

As AI tools get better at producing content, the value of producing content falls. What rises is judgment: knowing what is worth making, what is true and good, and what is missing. That is taste, and it is quickly becoming the currency of our industry.

Much of the slop we see online isn’t purely a machine problem. It’s what happens when we don’t have enough people with taste at the wheel. The tools take direction from people, and the output can only be as good as the direction it gets. That puts a responsibility on editors and media professionals, and on all of us as humans, to take quality control more seriously and be more honest about our own biases.

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3. Looking ahead

ABMI came at the right time for me personally, as I continue to think about what Communiqué will look like in 2027 and, more immediately, how to make our event in New York next week more valuable.

In many ways, ABMI has already shaped how I’m thinking about both. The questions of distribution, ownership, and how legacy media and creators can work together are not abstract for me. They sit at the centre of what we are building at Communiqué, and I look forward to sharing more of that with you in the coming months.

Our New York event on October 15 is where some of these conversations continue. In partnership with Syracuse University, Malindi Press, and Chapter IP, we are hosting a closed-door discussion on the evolution of the media and creator economy. If ABMI taught me anything, it is that the best conversations happen when you get the right people in a room and give them the freedom to speak candidly. That is exactly what we are aiming for. And if it goes well, you can expect another set of notes from me in two weeks.

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1. A little personality goes a long way

During the week of September 21, as heads of state and their delegations descended on New York for the 81st United Nations General Assembly, African fintech firm Flutterwave staged its own gathering on the sidelines. The payments unicorn hosted public- and private-sector leaders to discuss how to improve cross-border trade and payments in Africa. Pictures and videos from the gathering filled its social media pages, including a video of its chief executive, Gbenga Agboola, casually strutting through the city.

This was not the first time in recent weeks that Flutterwave had leaned on the personalities of its executives to tell its story. An earlier “most likely to” game with Agboola, Bankole Falade, the company’s legal and public policy chief, and other senior staff drew thousands of views across social media. Taken together, the posts point to a communications strategy that increasingly prioritises giving audiences a glimpse of the people running the company as it continues to prepare itself for an elusive IPO.

The shift may owe something to Oluchi Ezeugo, who joined Flutterwave in June as executive communications lead. Ezeugo previously led corporate communications at Helium Health and headed communications in the chief executive’s office at Sand Technologies. Her brief was to shape how the company’s leaders present themselves to the world: what they say, how they say it, and what audiences come to understand about the business through them. Flutterwave’s recent content shows how much that can involve beyond speeches and formal announcements. An executive’s humour, personality, and interactions with colleagues can give people a way to connect with a company whose products might otherwise feel abstract. Executive communications is one strand of that story. The job of holding all the strands together is one that companies around the world are now scrambling to fill: the corporate storyteller.

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2. Storytelling moves in-house

A company contains the raw material for many stories. There is the founder’s account of why it exists, the employee who can explain a difficult product decision, and the customer whose experience lends credence to the company’s reason to exist and serves as a testimonial for prospective customers. The corporate storyteller’s job is to gather all these stories into a coherent account of the business: what it believes, what it is building, and why anyone should care.

The title is enjoying a global renaissance. In December 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that the share of LinkedIn job postings mentioning “storyteller” had doubled within the previous year. About 50,000 marketing listings and more than 20,000 media and communications listings included the term. Separately, FactSet counted 469 mentions of “storyteller” or “storytelling” on earnings calls and investor days through December 11, 2025, compared with 359 in 2024 and 147 in 2015.

Corporate storytellers matter now because the institutions that once helped companies earn attention and trust are weakening. Previously, businesses could rely on traditional media to explain who they were. But newsrooms have shrunk, audiences are scattered across feeds, and trust in institutions, including the press, has fallen. Brands can pay podcasters, creators, and celebrity ambassadors to bridge the gap, but those relationships can be expensive and fragile. The audience belongs to the creator, and once the partnership ends, the brand loses access to that audience too. Also, with AI making content more abundant, a recognisable voice, a specific experience, or an honest explanation of a decision can give audiences something more substantial to connect with. Companies are increasingly bringing storytelling in-house to build those connections themselves.

3. Have we been here before?

African tech companies producing their own content is nothing new. In 2021, a wave of editors and writers left traditional media companies to build content engines inside startups newly flush with venture capital. Communiqué tracked the shift at the time. In April 2021, Paystack advertised for a managing editor to help build what it called “Africa’s largest digital business media network.” Some of those engines worked. PiggyVest is the clearest example of what that investment could produce. Its content team developed articles, comics, animations and research around Nigerians’ experiences with money. Others did not. When the tech bubble burst in 2022, many of the writers and editors who had crossed over returned to the media companies they had left.

The corporate storyteller belongs to this same lineage, but it is not the same job. Nor is it corporate communications, though it borrows from both. The three roles share tools: writing, a feel for audiences, and command of owned and earned platforms. What they do not share is purpose. A content marketer uses content to help attract, convert, and retain customers. At a payments company, that could mean publishing guides that help merchants run their businesses, then encouraging those readers to try its payment tools. The work is connected to a customer’s decision to use the product. The corporate communications manager owns relationships and the record: press releases, media relations, regulatory correspondence, and crisis statements. Their audience is mostly the press and, through it, everyone else. The work is custodial and often reactive, measured in coverage secured and crises contained.

The corporate storyteller owns the narrative and entire channels. Their responsibility is to develop the company’s account that runs through all its activities. They look for the experiences, people, and decisions that explain what the business stands for, then determine how to tell those stories across different settings. Their work can support both content marketing and corporate communications, but it’s rarely the same as either.

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4. Where is all this heading?

As Africa’s leading tech companies outgrow their challenger status, corporate storytellers will become even more necessary. A startup can win supporters by presenting itself as an ambitious outsider taking on an inefficient industry. Its audiences forgive a founder who speaks off the cuff, because candour is part of the appeal. An incumbent has no such licence. It answers to regulators, employs thousands, and serves millions. It needs a clear and cohesive account of itself, one that holds regardless of who is speaking. Some tech companies have already learned this the hard way.

In May, Tosin Eniolorunda, the co-founder and chief executive of Moniepoint, drew public ire after an appearance at The Platform Nigeria’s Workers’ Day edition. Eniolorunda said the company struggled to find candidates who met its global standards. Critics, who heard a broader dismissal of the Nigerian talent pool, reacted swiftly. They argued the problem lay in pay and in companies unwilling to train junior staff. Several pointed out that Eniolorunda himself had been shaped by years at Interswitch. He later clarified that he meant a shortage of experienced technical professionals, citing emigration and weaknesses in the talent pipeline, and pointed to Moniepoint’s investment in training and its predominantly Nigerian workforce. But the damage was already done.

The gaffe was all the more unusual because few companies in Nigerian tech have invested as heavily in corporate storytelling as Moniepoint. Its team draws on experience across television, film, advertising, and agency communications. And the work shows. Its Informal Economy Report, first published in 2024, was welcomed by the federal government as a basis for policy. The 2025 edition added an AI chatbot for exploring its data and a documentary series on the people who run Nigeria’s informal businesses. Across it all, Moniepoint tells a story of faith in ordinary Nigerians: their resilience, their enterprise, and their capacity to build. Then its CEO told a different story about Nigerian workers on Workers Day.

If a company that has built this much narrative infrastructure can still have its story contradicted by its own leader, then the lesson is not that storytelling investment is wasted. It is that even the best-resourced operations slip when nobody is guarding the script. That is the corporate storyteller’s job: not to produce more content, but to hold one account of the company steady across all touchpoints.

Chowdeck faced a similar reckoning this month when an older interview with its co-founder, Femi Aluko, resurfaced. In it, he said the platform’s bicycle riders earned an average of ₦100,000 a week. He compared this to doctors’ monthly pay. The comments provoked backlash for seemingly overlooking the conditions under which riders earn that money: the risks on the road, running costs, and earnings that fluctuate week to week. The comparison with doctors, in a country where professional pay is a sore point, struck critics as distasteful. When Chowdeck was a challenger looking for riders, talking up earnings made sense as a recruitment pitch. But Chowdeck now leads its category. At that size, a recruitment pitch becomes a statement about how the company treats the people who deliver for it, and riders, customers, regulators and the wider public are all paying attention.

Still, a better story would not have solved Chowdeck’s problem on its own. If riders feel they earn less than the company says, no amount of good writing will change that. There is a limit to what storytelling can do. It cannot fix a business problem, and it will not save a company from a bad reality. The storyteller’s most valuable skill may be telling leaders when the story and the reality have drifted apart. As a result, much of the hiring for this role will be reactive, following public stumbles rather than preventing them.

What happens after the hire will matter more than the title. The storyteller needs enough experience to understand the business and communicate its values, enough access to know what is changing, and enough authority to challenge the people running it. If they are only invited into the room when a decision needs announcing, they will spend much of their time explaining choices they had no opportunity to question.

Proving the value of this work will be difficult. The evidence may lie in easier hiring, stronger relationships with regulators, smoother fundraising, or an emerging problem addressed before it becomes a crisis. As African tech companies become institutions that people depend on, their stories become promises about how they will behave. The corporate storyteller’s job is to help the company make those promises clearly and tell its leaders when they are failing to keep them.

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1. The kids are alright

In October, Kenyan media platform Mtoto News plans to bring a children’s news bulletin to NTV, one of the country’s largest television stations. Mtoto News helps children report on the world around them: they propose programmes, choose subjects and conduct interviews, while adults provide training, production, and editorial support.

The partnership represents a bigger commitment to television. Last year, Mtoto partnered with Akili TV to broadcast two of its programmes. One, Mission Accomplished, featured two 12-year-olds interviewing people about their careers, giving other children a window into adults’ working lives. The other was a legal-literacy programme in which children questioned lawyers and policymakers about the laws meant to protect them.

The aim was to introduce these programmes, which began on YouTube and have attracted audiences across East Africa, to more viewers and learn how families responded. That family audience is central to Mtoto’s interest in NTV. In its view, it is doubling down on what already works: giving children space to tell their stories and bringing those stories into family homes. Mtoto hopes the bulletin will make children’s concerns part of the wider national conversation as Kenya’s elections draw nearer, while giving young viewers the chance to see children like them asking questions and explaining the world.

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Children’s media is usually understood as content made for children, with adults deciding what they should know and what will hold their attention. Mtoto News gives children a role in those decisions.

For Mtoto, television offers a way to build on years of helping children make themselves heard. Its partnerships give that work access to larger audiences without having to build those distribution networks itself. Advertising could eventually help cover production costs, alongside the grants and consultancy income that already support the organisation. The question is how Mtoto can fund this wider ambition: reaching more children, supporting more of them to create, and keeping their ideas central to the work.

2. Origin story

Mtoto News launched in 2017 when Jennifer Kaberi, a child development specialist in Nairobi, noticed a problem with the media her daughter consumed. Many of the characters did not look like her, so Kaberi decided to fix it. Mtoto, the Swahili word for “child”, was the result.

Mtoto News started as an X (formerly Twitter) account sharing child-friendly content. Its first programme was News Insights. A child would come into Mtoto’s Nairobi office to present news items, while the team gathered footage around the city. The segments were packaged as a show: news made by children for other children. X was not the best place for this, so YouTube became the main distribution platform, alongside TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

Growth came through training. Mtoto began hosting digital-literacy sessions that attracted children who wanted to write, host podcasts, or present shows, and the organisation developed outlets for those interests. Alongside its YouTube shows, it began publishing two quarterly magazines, one for 13- to 17-year-olds and another for children under 12, alongside storybooks. Children submit stories, which staff edit and design. Copies are sold through an online shop or printed with partner funding for distribution to schools.

Mtoto also produces around ten shows and podcasts led by children. Its Student Press Action Network establishes journalism clubs in Kenyan schools. It has also expanded into events. Children working with Mtoto proposed a gathering where young people from across the continent could compare experiences. Mtoto’s first African Children’s Summit brought between 300 and 400 children to Nairobi in 2023. Participants voted to hold the next gathering in South Africa, and a third is planned for Sierra Leone in 2027.

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3. Who pays the piper?

The global children’s media market is worth billions of dollars, but much of that value is captured by organisations that make media for children, not children making media for themselves. The latter has a basic problem: the content is hard to monetise. Advertisers want to reach children, because children shape much of what their parents buy. But that money goes to whatever holds children’s attention longest, which is usually cartoons and entertainment, not shows in which a 12-year-old questions a lawyer. On YouTube, videos marked as made for children cannot carry personalised ads, so they earn less. Organisations that have tried to live off the content alone have struggled.

Recognition is not enough. Children’s Express, the American news organisation staffed by young reporters, won Emmy and Peabody awards but closed in 2001. At its closure, the Kellogg Foundation provided 95% of its income. YR Media in Oakland won two Peabodys and placed stories on NPR. It shut down in 2024. Prestige did not translate into income. Mtoto already has this problem: its Akili partnership did not generate revenue and only provided access to a wider audience. If the NTV deal follows the same pattern, the broadcaster gets the programme and the goodwill, while Mtoto carries the cost.

Mtoto has built relationships with children, parents, and schools. Those relationships, combined with its production skills, could become its strongest commercial assets. Helping children create journalism generates several kinds of value: children learn, schools gain teaching programmes, broadcasters receive content, and institutions gain a better understanding of young people’s experiences. The challenge is finding buyers for each without auctioning off the children’s freedom to speak.

A solution is to charge for teaching the skills that make production possible. IndyKids in the United States offers an example. Founded in 2005, it publishes journalism produced by children and runs workshops where participants pitch, report, write, and edit with professional mentors. Its advertised autumn workshop costs $240, with scholarships available. IndyKids’s content pipeline gives the training a clear path: children make something that people beyond their classroom can read. The organisation can charge for that learning experience without requiring the newspaper itself to cover every cost. But it exists in a market with a more robust media ecosystem and audiences with significant ability to pay for content.

Grants and consultancy work provide most of Mtoto’s income. Its services include child-friendly materials on subjects such as cyberbullying and climate change, training for journalists who report on children, and, through Kutunga, a sister design academy co-founded by Kaberi, training for developers, designers, and other technologists to build digital products with children’s safety in mind. Mtoto has also run workshops in which children advised TikTok on safety and content. However, this work comes one project at a time, mostly from development organisations whose budgets rise and fall. Mtoto could turn it into repeat services with set prices. These could include a trained panel of children that companies consult before launching products, regular research on how Kenyan children use media, and safety reviews for platforms and edtech firms under growing pressure to show they protect young users. Those clients have bigger and steadier budgets.

Mtoto has a plausible path to sustainability. Its strongest prospect is a business in which training and consultancy help pay for journalism made by children. It already earns money from those services. What remains unclear is whether customers will pay regularly, and enough to cover both the services they buy and the editorial work that generates little income. In recent years, the answer has been: not likely.

The international funding environment that supports organisations like Mtoto is shrinking. That brings greater pressure to find commercial income just as development organisations, which make up a large part of its likely consultancy customers, face tighter budgets themselves. More television exposure will not resolve that question unless broadcasters or advertisers contribute to production costs.

Mtoto also faces limits on what it can sell. A consultancy client must be able to hear criticism of its product. An advertiser must accept that children’s concerns will not always make comfortable television. If winning contracts requires Mtoto to narrow who participates or what they can say, it risks weakening the very work that makes it useful.

Diversification therefore matters, but several unreliable income streams do not automatically make a sustainable business. Mtoto needs repeat customers, contracts that cover the full cost of delivery, and enough income left over to support its journalism. It has created a way for children to participate in media. Its next task is to prove that enough institutions will consistently pay to keep that participation possible.

Editor’s note: We have updated this article to clarify that Mtoto News’s television partnerships are primarily intended to expand its reach, rather than generate revenue. Following feedback from the organisation, we revised passages that placed too much emphasis on television revenue as a factor in its financial sustainability. The article’s broader analysis of funding and sustainability remains.

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1. Brave new world

On 23 May earlier this year, Funke Akindele released Omo Ghetto: The Saga on her YouTube channel. The film arrived in two parts; together, they have since gathered more than four million views. Five years earlier, Omo Ghetto saw a very different kind of success. Released in cinemas in December 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it went on to earn more than ₦600 million at the Nigerian box office and became the highest-grossing Nigerian film of all time.

It held the top position until Akindele took it back from herself. The films that eventually displaced it—Battle on Buka Street, A Tribe Called Judah, and Everybody Loves Jenifa—were largely her own. Omo Ghetto now sits seventh on the all-time list. But even five years later, it remains one of the clearest examples of Akindele’s ability to turn Nigerian films into mass-market events.

A film like Omo Ghetto follows a fairly predictable journey. It spends a few months in cinemas before moving to television or a streaming platform where it begins a second commercial life. Omo Ghetto did this too. After its cinema run, the film became available on Netflix. Then, in May, it appeared on YouTube. It was particularly interesting that Nollywood’s most commercially successful producer would eventually put one of her biggest films on a platform anyone could watch.

But this is the brave new world Nollywood now inhabits. Over the last few years, YouTube has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in Nigerian filmmaking. Every year, over 1,100 films are released on the platform. Some are uploaded by filmmakers with a few thousand subscribers. Others come from channels with audiences in the millions.

Around those channels, an entire industry has formed. Producers such as Ruth Kadiri, Uduak Isong and Omoni Oboli have built businesses that increasingly resemble independent film studios and television networks at the same time. They commission scripts, finance films, assemble casts, hire directors and crews, oversee post-production and release new movies directly to audiences they have accumulated themselves.

The films have created their own stars. Actors who may not regularly headline Nigeria’s biggest cinema releases can appear repeatedly before millions of viewers. Writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, production managers, sound engineers and marketers move between productions designed specifically for these channels. A film can be written, shot, edited, packaged and uploaded within weeks before much of the same machinery begins working on the next one. This is the essence of the Nollywood YouTube industrial complex: the network of filmmakers, production companies, actors, crew members, and audiences that has grown around producing Nigerian movies for YouTube. And increasingly, this is where Nollywood operates as an industry.

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2. Home videos find a new home

To understand the Nollywood YouTube industrial complex, however, you first have to understand what came before it. Nollywood has always favoured direct-to-consumer distribution.

In Communiqué 54, we explained why.

“Nigeria underwent a structural adjustment programme in the late 1980s that transformed its foreign exchange and trade policies. The resulting inflation and currency devaluation hit the cinema and film industry particularly hard. Cinema operators found it difficult to maintain their facilities and import new films as middle-class Nigerians, the primary customers, could no longer afford tickets. The film industry began developing against this backdrop, prioritising a direct-to-consumer distribution model that excluded the cinema middlemen altogether. This model favoured high-volume, low-cost, low-quality productions distributed via VHS tapes and later CDs for home viewing.”

This version of Nollywood first appeared on YouTube. Distributors who had already released films on VHS, VCDs, and other distribution channels began uploading old catalogues to the platform. One of the earliest examples was NollywoodLove, the YouTube channel that eventually became iROKOtv. Its catalogue of old Nollywood films showed that there was an online audience for Nigerian movies.

In the early 2010s, commercial banks began building their own media operations on YouTube. GTBank launched Ndani TV in 2012, UBA followed with REDTV in 2015, and Access Bank launched Accelerate TV in 2016. These channels were marketing engines before they were media businesses. Their primary goal was not to earn advertising revenue from YouTube, but to associate the banks with culture and reach a younger audience spending more time online. Because the banks had marketing budgets, they didn’t need the channels to be immediately profitable. They could finance original web series and release them for free. Early shows such as Skinny Girl in Transit, Gidi Up, and The Men’s Club helped set the expectation that audiences could watch original Nollywood content directly on YouTube. This is the foundation the industry currently stands on.

At the same time, independent filmmakers began to realise that they could bypass traditional distributors and go direct to the audience. In 2017, Ruth Kadiri decided to try. She was already producing films for outlets like DStv and iROKO. Kadiri had two films ready for distribution. Rather than sell both, she let a distributor take one and uploaded the second one to YouTube. The numbers were not massive, but they were encouraging enough for her to keep at it. Many producers would eventually follow her. As the economics of African streaming grew more uncertain and international platforms reduced investment in Nigerian originals, that trickle of filmmakers moving toward YouTube became a wave.

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3. Inside the complex

YouTube’s economics have shaped the way films are made. Nollywood producers strive to make them as cheaply and as quickly as possible. Average production costs range from ₦12–15 million. “The unofficial rule of Nollywood YouTube is that you cannot spend too much money. If you do, you may not make your money back,” Oma Areh said to Communiqué. That pressure compresses production. Some producers can shoot an entire film in four days. The consequences are visible in the films themselves. There is less time for rehearsals, elaborate set-ups, multiple locations or long shooting schedules.

The larger production houses have found ways to make that model even cheaper through economies of scale. Rather than assemble a new crew for every film, some maintain a stable group of directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, sound teams and, in some cases, actors on salaries. That removes the cost and uncertainty of repeatedly hiring freelancers. Location is particularly important. Renting houses and other spaces repeatedly can quickly inflate a budget, so some production houses buy or lease properties and reuse them across several films. “The challenge is making the same places look different.” Precious Kadiri, a producer at Ruth Kadiri Films, said to Communiqué. “A producer may redress a house, change the interiors or occasionally move exterior scenes elsewhere, but if you produce frequently you will have to rent out a separate location so viewers do not feel as though every film is happening in the same world.”

Then there is the question of length. The web series that helped establish Nigerian filmmaking on YouTube have increasingly given way to full-length films. A 30-minute episode provides fewer opportunities to insert ads than a film running for 90 minutes or two hours. Series still exist, but they have been stretched. Many now run for as long as 90 minutes, the average length of a feature film. So producers concentrate on making a single long production, market it heavily and try to maximise the first few days after release like a theatrical opening weekend.

For an established channel with over a million followers, four million views can be enough to cover the cost of production. But four million views are not always worth the same amount. A million views can earn between $1,500 and $5,000, depending on your audience’s location. Large channels with significant foreign audiences can earn as much as $10,000 per million. Producers therefore build release schedules around the diaspora. “A lot of releases are also timed around when they know that these people are going to be awake and they will have a break from work,” Areh said. At the top end, the numbers become significant. A large channel releasing a film every week can generate between $80,000 and $150,000 a month.

Beyond YouTube advertising, producers are increasingly monetising through brand placements. Remittance companies are particularly active because many of these films attract large Nigerian audiences in the US, UK and Canada, which make up a significant percentage of their users.

There are also parallel French-language channels. The same films are subtitled in French and uploaded separately for Francophone Africa and the French-speaking diaspora, allowing one production to earn twice. These parallel channels can generate an additional $20,000 to $50,000 a month.

The National Film and Video Censors Board is now trying to bring the Nollywood industry on YouTube more firmly within its control. The Board says films released on YouTube must be classified before distribution and has warned that unclassified titles could face takedown orders. In August, the Board moved against Living in Colours, a Prism House Studio film set to be released on YouTube, citing both its unclassified status and the Same-Sex scenes in the trailer contravening Nigeria’s Same Sex Act. The Board was able to stop the film’s physical premiere in Lagos and filed a suit to block its release, but it has since been released on YouTube.

Classification matters for the industry. It will introduce another step into a production cycle designed to move from script to release within weeks. This could mean additional fees, longer timelines and more compliance work, costs that larger production houses may absorb more easily than smaller filmmakers. But it could also formalise an ecosystem that already employs actors, writers, directors, editors, cinematographers and marketers at significant scale.

The bigger question is what happens as YouTube filmmaking stops being treated as a side market and becomes recognised as Nollywood itself. Producers can now own their audiences, earn in foreign currency, build catalogues that generate revenue long after release without depending on cinemas or streaming commissions.

Yet that independence comes with a different kind of dependence. The industry is heavily exposed to one global platform: its algorithms, advertising rates, monetisation policies and ability to deliver valuable diaspora audiences. Producers must also work out whether they can improve production quality without breaking the low-cost economics that made the model possible.

Nollywood has once again built a distribution system around the limitations of the one before it. The Nollywood YouTube industrial complex is already here, but it’s not yet clear how it will shape the industry’s future.

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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!

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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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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1. A challenging story

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

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

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

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

2. But what exactly is a canon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Big questions require big answers

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

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

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

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

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

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4. Market forces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. A hidden gem

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

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

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

2. Roots

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Cirque du Soleil playbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Immersia’s endgame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Flipping the year-end playbook

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

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

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

2. Making politics cool again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Building an advocacy media platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Nobel intentions

In December 2025, when a new profile of Wole Soyinka began circulating online, the dominant reaction in many corners of the internet was a quiet sense of intrigue. Not because of what the piece said, but because of what it was. A definitive chronicling of Soyinka’s life, it ran to nearly 20,000 words. It moved deliberately across the literary giant’s lifetime, lingering on his early career, intellectual formation, literary battles, exile, and the long arc of a life lived in public thought. It read less like a magazine article and more like a historical document.

This was striking because, at the time, the dominant story about Soyinka was far smaller: a viral political moment. In the month before, headlines across local and international publications had focused on the Trump administration’s decision to revoke his visa. It was the latest episode in a long-running feud the Nobel Laureate has had with the US president, dating back to his 2016 election, when he tore up his US green card. In the compressed logic of contemporary media, Soyinka had been reduced to a symbol in a political argument.

The longform profile did the opposite. It refused immediacy and resisted the gravitational pull of the news cycle. Instead, it attempted something much harder: to chronicle the full intellectual and historical weight of one of Africa’s most consequential cultural figures.

That ambition to exhaustively document African lives and ideas sits at the heart of Open Country Mag. Founded as a literary magazine and deeply reported narrative nonfiction, Open Country Mag operates on a premise that runs against the structural logic of Africa’s digital media economy: that some stories cannot be told quickly, cheaply, or briefly without losing their meaning.

In a media ecosystem optimised for virality, speed, and short-form consumption, Open Country Mag has, over the last five years, positioned itself as the platform for longform writing that treats African contemporary life not as episodic content, but as something worthy of depth, permanence, and record.

2. Open Country Mag’s literary origins

In 2020, Africa was experiencing what many observers described as a quiet literary renaissance. A new generation of digital literary journals, including Lolwe, Doek, and Isele Magazine, was emerging with a shared ambition: to publish both new and established writers, expand the reach of African literature online, and introduce younger audiences to contemporary literary work. It was within this broader wave that Open Country Mag first took shape.

Its founder, Otosirieze Obi-Young, had until April 2020 served as deputy editor of Brittle Paper, one of the most influential African literary platforms of the previous decade. His departure came after a highly public dispute with the magazine, which fired him after he published a critical piece on the wife of popular author and wife of Former Kaduna state governor, Hadiza El- Rufai. Obi-Young accused the publication’s founder of censorship and editorial overreach, and framed his exit as the culmination of tensions over autonomy, and decision-making power. The episode quickly became one of the most widely discussed controversies in African literary circles that year.

In the aftermath, Obi-Young was clear that he wanted to continue the work he loved. But he was equally determined to build something structurally different. Rather than follow the traditional literary magazine model of opening submissions and publishing short fiction, poetry, and essays, he chose a more unusual starting point: longform, deeply reported profiles of major African literary figures.

For Obi-Young, starting with longform profiles was a deliberate choice to address a critical gap: African writers were increasingly visible internationally, but rarely fully understood. Short coverage often focused on prizes, controversies, or book launches, without situating writers in their broader intellectual, cultural, and historical contexts. “People think that because you see African writers getting international coverage that they have been contextualised,” he said to Communiqué. “That’s not it. I can count probably on one hand African writers who have been covered in the West with real context.” Longform writing gave Open Country Mag the space to do what shorter formats could not: tell stories that capture both the life and the literary significance of Africa’s leading writers.

Obi-Young’s extensive network in the African literary scene, built during his time working at Brittle Paper, and judging some of the continent’s most important literary competitions including the Miles Moorland Fellowship, and The Gerald Kraak prize proved pivotal in shaping Open Country Mag’s early work. Leveraging these connections, he secured interviews with some of the continent’s most sought-after literary figures, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Maaza Mengiste, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, both of whom had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. Even Wole Soyinka agreed to be interviewed in 2021, though the interview didn’t take place until 2025.

By 2023, Open Country’s scope had widened beyond literature to include cultural figures across film, media, and public life, featuring personalities such as Rita Dominic, Chidi Mokeme, Chude Jideonwo, Tunde Onakoya and Cardinal Francis Arinze. “In the process of doing this [literary stories], I realised there were many more use cases for this,” he told Communiqué. “We will acknowledge a person for what they’ve created in culture, which is the whole point. But we will also look at every other thing. We’ll ask you the hard questions.”

“It’s as close as possible to the center of culture. People don’t know that because they cannot see that there is a center of culture. But in time, they will see it. Because when you have a novelist on a cover and you have a prelate on a cover, and you have an actor on the same magazine cover, and you have a sports person on the same magazine cover, there’s something new being built. And literature is the anchor, tying it all together.”

3. The longform playbook

On August 31, 1946, readers of The New Yorker were surprised by the content—a 30,000-word chronicling of the devastation the US nuclear bomb had wrought on Japan. The piece, which nearly filled all the editorial space in that issue, would later be published as a book.

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” was a seismic event in American journalism. The magazine sold out all 300,000 copies within hours. Albert Einstein attempted to buy 1,000 copies to send to fellow scientists. Within two weeks, a second-hand copy of that New Yorker issue sold for 120 times its cover price. But the article’s true significance was demonstrating that longform journalism could achieve what conventional reporting could not: not merely inform, but immerse readers in the subject of a piece, whether an event or a person’s life.

This breakthrough laid the groundwork for what would emerge in the 1960s as the New Journalism movement. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion pushed the form further, applying techniques previously reserved for fiction, like scene-by-scene construction, full dialogue, and third-person point of view, to nonfiction reporting. Magazines like Esquire, Harper’s, and The New Yorker championed this storytelling style.

The editors were as crucial as the writers. At Esquire, Harold Hayes transformed the magazine into what one former editor called a “literary and cultural proving ground”. He gave writers space to experiment, and they delivered: Gay Talese’s 1966 profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” became a landmark of the form—a deeply reported portrait built entirely around the singer not wanting to talk. At Harper’s, Willie Morris ran Norman Mailer’s “The Steps of the Pentagon,” a 90,000-word story on the Vietnam War protests in a single issue. It was the equivalent of a 300-page book.

The business impact was profound. Esquire’s circulation grew from 500,000 to 2 million during the 1960s. Magazines discovered that longform distinguished them from daily newspapers and created a durable product readers would seek out and keep. This is the tradition that Open Country Mag adheres to, but with a uniquely African flavour.

In Communiqué 93, we observed that African publications were returning to print, signalling a renewed appetite for tangible, lasting media. But a crucial ingredient for a successful print publication is longform writing. Deeply reported, context-rich, and ambitious in scope, this kind of storytelling is what allows magazines to create a durable record, distinguish themselves from ephemeral digital content, and cultivate readership that values depth over immediacy.

Yet the ambitions of Open Country Mag remain difficult to realise. Obi-Young is the only editor at OCM and continues to shape its editorial direction, he has trained a couple of writers in the magazine style, but there is a limited pool of writers across Africa who can consistently produce narrative nonfiction at this scale. Sustaining such output over time demands both discipline and significant institutional support, elements that are scarce in our media ecosystem. Financial constraints, inconsistent reader habits, and the challenge of monetising longform in Africa add further pressure. Editorial infrastructure, fact-checking, and the time-intensive nature of immersive reporting remain luxuries few publications can afford.

Despite these structural challenges, Open Country Mag’s work carries a symbolic and practical significance. It shows what is possible when African publications commit to longform storytelling: that the continent’s writers, thinkers, and cultural figures can be chronicled with nuance, rigour, and ambition. Even if its model is difficult to replicate at scale today, it establishes a blueprint, a proof of concept if you may, that longform in Africa is not only feasible but essential for documenting the intellectual and cultural life of the continent.

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• Behind every major cultural platform is an invisible layer of communications infrastructure shaping how the world sees African creativity. the creative Industries don’t scale on talent alone; they scale on the systems that give that talent visibility, credibility, and organisation.

• Curated experiences and well-run events aren’t just marketing tactics. They are the structural backbone that attracts investment, captures attention and gives the creative economy the legitimacy it needs to grow.

1. Where the art season really begins

Every year, ART X Lagos, West Africa’s premier art fair, begins the same way: with a press conference. It’s where the vision for each edition is unveiled, and where the fair’s organisers outline what audiences, collectors, artists, and partners should expect.

For the 10th edition, the format remained the same, but the atmosphere carried added significance. ART X had reached its 10th anniversary, so when founder Tokini Peterside-Schwebig took the microphone, she looked back on a decade of ambition, experimentation, and cultural advocacy. Then, with the same measured confidence that has shaped the fair’s trajectory, she revealed what this year holds.

The event was polished, intentional, and seamless. Every element, from messaging to media coordination and the pacing of the announcement, felt precise. That precision was the output of a communications engine that is becoming one of the most influential behind-the-scenes forces in Nigeria’s creative economy: Redrick PR.

ART X Lagos is only one stop in an event marathon that has come to define Lagos’ cultural and creative economy season. And this year, Redrick has helmed communications for several key events on the calendar, including Design Week Lagos, Lagos Fashion Week, and Entertainment Week Lagos.

While ART X Lagos spent the last decade building a cultural platform that amplifies African art, Redrick has spent just as long shaping how these conversations reach audiences locally and internationally. First for luxury brands like L’Oréal and Moët Hennessy, and now it’s applying that same muscle to creative economy events.

2. From blogger to brand architect

Before Redrick existed, its founder, Ijeoma Balogun, was a teenager with an early interest in communication. She won speech-writing competitions, wrote for her school press club, and unknowingly ran her first PR campaign when she crafted messaging and rallied support to become head girl in secondary school.

After secondary school, Balogun moved to Paris to study global communications, with a minor in business administration. But her real education began earlier, during a gap year in Lagos. When she couldn’t secure an internship at True Love—the glossy magazine widely seen as Nigeria’s answer to Vogue—she created her own platform: a fashion blog called Naija Fashion Freak. The timing was perfect. Blogging was beginning to shape media globally, and Balogun was among the early adopters.

Her experience running her personal blog led to a role at BellaNaija, then still a fledgling blog. Balogun became the publication’s first style editor. Running the vertical exposed her to another emerging layer of Nigeria’s creative industries: fashion PR. Designers began emailing her, pitching content and requesting placement. It was the first time she saw an opportunity to help brands reach their target audience.

When Balogun returned to Lagos after university, she already had four years’ experience at BellaNaija and was ready for a change. She initially planned to work at a PR agency. But unable to secure a role at her preferred firm during her compulsory national service, she began freelancing.

Her first client came through a referral from BellaNaija founder Uche Pedro, who knew she wanted to work in PR. It was a lifestyle television show on DStv, produced by media entrepreneur Bola Balogun. Shortly after, she secured her second client: former Miss World and fashion entrepreneur Agbani Darego.

From the beginning, Redrick was positioned in the cultural and creative economy. Balogun’s early work in fashion media shaped the agency’s first specialisation: fashion, beauty, and entertainment. The contacts she built during her BellaNaija and blogging years became her first marketing channel. And one of those relationships led to the agency’s breakout account.

Lagos Fashion Week, already a fast-growing cultural platform, needed a more structured communications strategy. The founder, Omoyemi Akerele, had established a relationship with Balogun since her BellaNaija days. That relationship, alongside a recommendation from Bola Balogun, helped Redrick land Lagos Fashion Week as a client. They’ve been together for 10 years now.

3. The experiential playbook

Over the last decade, global luxury brands—from Ralph Lauren and Tom Ford—have expanded into Africa. They have initially focused on distribution, retail partnerships, and the slow build-out of formal local operations. But the real work of establishing presence has happened through cultural positioning, and in Nigeria, that positioning has depended heavily on events.

“When you’re operating in the consumer lifestyle segment in Nigeria, you do events to engage with your target audience, and engage with them in a way that is intimate,” Balogun told Communiqué. In a market where advertising infrastructure remains fragmented, and consumer trust is built socially, events have become the most effective top-of-funnel strategy. The consumer is persuaded not only through messaging but through proximity to brands, community, and cultural gatekeepers.

“As a people, we like to experience brands. You can’t be a brand speaking directly to consumers and not have an experiential element to your engagement strategies. It’s not possible—not in this environment,” she said.

These events are built for influence, not scale. The goal is not thousands of guests, but the right hundred. Invitations are curated with surgical precision. As Balogun puts it: “Ahead of the event, you say, I need these specific 120 people. At the end of the day, a good ratio we judge ourselves by is about 60%. To get that range, you need to invite at least double. And we typically reach 60–80% of our target audience.”

The agency’s early work with Lagos Fashion Week became the training ground for this model. As international beauty and fashion brands entered Nigeria, Redrick was already fluent in the cultural mechanics they needed to succeed. The agency became a bridge: translating global expectations into local execution.

Soon, the model expanded beyond luxury fashion. When Amazon Prime Video launched in Nigeria, it turned to Redrick. Redrick also helped NBA Africa launch in Nigeria, tapping into the creative economy through partnerships with organisations like ART X to grow basketball culture in the country.

4. A game of scale

More than a decade after its founding, Redrick has helped shape how global companies introduce themselves to one of Africa’s most culturally influential markets, landing placements in international publications like Vogue, Airmail, The Business of Fashion, and CNN, and generating more than $200 million in earned media value for its clients. Now, it’s taking that experience and applying it specifically to creative economy events.

In 2021, the agency added Entertainment Week Lagos to its client roster. This year, it added Design Week Lagos and ART X Lagos. The timing isn’t accidental. The creative economy, once treated as a side activity, is now recognised as a meaningful contributor to national economic growth.

“When we started with Lagos Fashion Week, people did not take us seriously,” Balogun recalls. “It was not considered work—people thought we were just having fun wearing clothes. Now there’s a shift. The creative industry has such a low barrier to entry, and it gives a large number of people employment and the opportunity to create something for themselves. And creative industry events are the infrastructure on which the industry has been built.”

Infrastructure may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of fashion shows, art fairs, or cultural festivals. But in practice, they perform much of the same function: they organise activity, concentrate attention, and signal value. Without platforms where talent can be discovered, funded, or benchmarked, creativity remains scattered, informal, and economically insignificant.

Events create visibility, enabling the right audiences—collectors, investors, corporate partners, global media—to find the right creators. They build ecosystems by bringing fragmented industry nodes together in one room: galleries, investors, sponsors, policymakers, and emerging talent. They also help attract investment. The presence of international brands at Lagos Fashion Week or global collectors at ART X signals that the market exists and is worth taking seriously. Standards rise, expectations evolve, and the work becomes more institutional.

Beyond economics, these events have helped reinforce Lagos’s reputation as a cultural capital on the continent. Redrick’s role in that shift is strategic. It ensures the right people hear the right message at the right time. And in doing so, it reinforces the belief not just that the creative economy matters, but that it can scale.

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• SABC+ shows how public broadcasters can reinvent themselves through streaming to reach digital audiences and diversify revenue.

• The platform’s rapid growth to 1.5 million users signals rising demand for accessible, local streaming alternatives in Africa.

• SABC’s digital transformation shows that survival in the streaming age requires more than just content; it demands infrastructure, innovation, and the courage to rebuild from within..

1. Profit and loss

Last month, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) released its annual financial statement for the year ending 31 March 2025, and the results painted a picture of a broadcaster in transition. For the tenth consecutive year, the national broadcaster reported a net loss, as a 3% increase in expenditure outpaced its modest 1.3% rise in revenue.

Yet, beneath the sobering financials lay a far more optimistic story. SABC’s digital platforms delivered high levels of engagement, garnering 1.48 billion lifetime YouTube views and a 290% year-on-year surge in podcast downloads. Meanwhile, its streaming platform, SABC+, surpassed 850,000 registered users by March 2025 and has since crossed 1.5 million, a milestone powered by the addition of new channels and spikes in viewership during major sporting events. The numbers are proof of the success of SABC’s ongoing digital transformation efforts. Central to this effort is SABC+, the broadcaster’s over-the-top (OTT) streaming service.

In Communiqué 74, we noted that: “Reinventing a public service broadcaster rests on two core pillars: content and technology. Content is the heart of any broadcaster’s relevance. For a public broadcaster to survive and thrive, it must invest in programming that speaks directly to the realities, values, and aspirations of its audience. The second pillar is technology. As audience habits shift away from traditional TV, public broadcasters must follow the audience where they are — online. Broadcasters worldwide have responded by building robust digital platforms to serve on-demand content.”

For many public service broadcasters, reinvention begins with content: modernising storytelling, commissioning original programming, and developing new formats for digital audiences. But SABC has taken a different approach. Rather than starting with programming, it began by fixing the plumbing, investing in the technology that underpins digital delivery. With SABC+, the South African broadcaster has chosen to lead with infrastructure: building a platform capable of carrying the institution into the streaming age.

What began as a complementary digital channel is slowly becoming the cornerstone of how SABC distributes content, engages audiences, and experiments with new revenue streams.

2. A broadcaster at crossroads

Like many Anglophone African government services, the SABC was modelled after its British counterpart, the BBC. SABC inherited not only the British public service ethos but also its funding architecture, the television licence system.

Under this model, every household that owns a TV set is required to pay an annual licence fee, the proceeds of which are meant to fund public broadcasting in the public interest. In theory, the system protects editorial independence by insulating broadcasters from political interference. In practice, however, the model has struggled to survive in the digital age.

As South African audiences have migrated online, compliance with licence payments has collapsed. According to the SABC’s 2025 annual report, only around 16% of households pay their licence fees, leaving billions of rands in uncollected revenue each year. The result is a massive and widening funding gap. This structural deficiency makes it difficult for the SABC to invest in new programming, technology, or talent at the same scale as its commercial competitors. To stay afloat, the broadcaster has had to rely increasingly on advertising and government bailouts.

But the SABC’s constraints are not just about declining licence revenues. The broadcaster also operates in a restrictive regulatory environment. Under South Africa’s Broadcast Digital Migration Policy of 2008, the SABC is compelled to use digital terrestrial television (DTT). This system sends TV signals through ground-based transmitters rather than via satellite or internet-based platforms. The regulation mandates that 84% of SABC’s transmission must run on DTT infrastructure managed by the state-owned signal distributor, Sentech. While this structure was designed to ensure universal access to public broadcasting, it has become a burden.

Maintaining DTT infrastructure is expensive, and the policy effectively prevents the SABC from pursuing cheaper, more scalable alternatives, such as direct-to-home (DTH) satellite transmission. This dependency on terrestrial broadcasting has eroded the corporation’s competitiveness, particularly as private rivals like MultiChoice and Netflix have built flexible, multi-platform ecosystems that reach audiences wherever they are: on phones, smart TVs, or laptops. Constrained by dwindling revenues and the limitations of terrestrial infrastructure, the SABC began to see digital streaming as an alternative to diversify income beyond the collapsing licence system and reconnect with an increasingly digital audience that had long drifted from traditional TV.

“What we don’t want to do is lose our linear audience. We actually want to provide them with an alternative viewing option of our content. Instead of losing them, we’re migrating them,” SABC’s former COO, Ian Plaatjes, said to Variety at the launch of SABC+.

3. The devil in the details

SABC’s first foray into streaming began as a partnership. In 2020, the broadcaster teamed up with state-owned telecommunications provider Telkom to launch TelkomONE. The new platform merged the strengths of both institutions. Telkom provided the infrastructure, bandwidth, hosting, and technical support, while SABC contributed the content.

The platform adopted a freemium model. Users could register for free to access a limited catalogue of live news, entertainment, and inspirational content, while premium offerings, such as music, short films, and TV series, were available behind a paywall. But by 2022, just two years in, Telkom decided to discontinue the service, citing a need to refocus on its core telecom operations. SABC took full ownership of the platform and rebranded it as SABC+.

The timing proved fortuitous. SABC+ launched just ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The tournament provided the perfect launchpad, driving massive user sign-ups.

SABC+ adopted an advertising-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) model, instead of continuing with the freemium subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) model that TelkomONE had used. This pivot proved critical. MultiChoice held exclusive rights to major tournaments like the Cricket World Cup and the Rugby World Cup, two of the biggest sports in South Africa. By removing the paywall, SABC+ provided access to premium sporting content to millions of South Africans who had previously been priced out.

A rebrand in December 2023 introduced a sleeker design and enhanced streaming quality to SABC+, resulting in a surge in user growth. By April 2024, the platform had reached 1 million users, up from the 150,000 it inherited from TelkomONE. Then it had to start all over again.

The SABC+ platform was managed by Discover Digital, a South African media company, which had previously managed TelkomONE. For its services, Discover Digital was paid R35 million. However, SABC claimed that its then COO, Ian Plaatjes, Head of digital, Francois Naicker, and Sales Head, Reginald Nxumalo, had hidden a clause allocating 7.5% of the advertising revenue generated on SABC+ to Discover Digital, despite presenting to the board that SABC would retain 100%.

The fallout was swift. The implicated executives were dismissed, and SABC began to rebuild SABC+, this time partnering with Dubai-based streaming technology provider Mangomolo. Mangomolo had helped launch streaming services for platforms like Discovery Networks, Orange Telecom, and Dubai Media.

In July 2024, the broadcaster relaunched SABC+ for the second time. The new platform grew rapidly, hitting 1 million users by May 2025 and 1.5 million by October. Monthly revenue rose from R100,000 in April 2024 to R700,000 by March 2025.

4. The endgame

SABC’s streaming ambitions have also followed closely with those of the BBC. In 2009, when the BBC launched its streaming service, BBC iPlayer, it was a free offering accessible to anyone in the UK with an internet connection. However, from September 1, 2016, a TV licence became a requirement to watch content on iPlayer. Even that has proven insufficient. In January of this year, Bloomberg reported that the UK was considering making households that only use streaming services, such as Netflix and Disney+, pay the BBC licence fee as part of plans to modernise the way it funds the public-service broadcaster.

When the SABC broached a similar idea in 2021, it was met with stiff resistance from streamers like Showmax, who argued that such a policy would unfairly burden digital streamers. Still, the idea speaks to the dilemma facing legacy public broadcasters worldwide: how to sustain a universal service mandate in an era where audiences are increasingly fragmented and consumption habits vary.

Nevertheless, SABC+ sits at the centre of a five-year strategic plan that the corporation hopes will return it to profitability by 2027. For now, the platform remains free, but that may not be the case for long. In the future, the broadcaster may link SABC+ user registrations to the television licence. A move that would compel South Africa’s millions of digital viewers to pay their dues and help close the funding gap.

SABC’s digital transformation has already begun to show signs of success in South Africa. Ultimately, it could provide a blueprint for how public media in Africa can reinvent itself for the streaming age.

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1. African media brands are returning to print not out of nostalgia, but to signal permanence, credibility, and craftsmanship in a digital-first world.

2. This new era of magazines treats print as a collectible object—carefully designed, limited in supply, and built to deepen loyalty while attracting premium advertisers.

3. By pairing print with curated events, publishers are extending their storytelling into real-life experiences, turning audiences into communities and culture into connection.

1. A break from the norm

For over a decade, Culture Custodian has had its finger on the pulse of Nigerian culture—breaking iconic stories, spotlighting emerging artists, and amplifying a generation of creatives redefining what it means to make and move culture. And for the entire decade, the publication has lived online. That is, until a few days ago, when it launched The Custodian, its first print magazine issue, in London.

The debut issue, fronted by filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr.—whose My Father’s Shadow became the first Nigerian film to be picked at the Cannes Film Festival official selection—sets the tone for what The Custodian aspires to be: a chronicle of Nigerian creativity in its most dynamic form. Through essays, profiles, features, and visual art, the magazine captures how young Nigerians are shaping identity, creativity, and survival in real time.

Like Culture Custodian, NAG Mag, a South African gaming publication, also returned to print in 2023, this time with a special edition. After initially shutting down its monthly print edition in 2015, the publication reintroduced an annual special issue and now plans to expand it into a quarterly print cycle.

Across Africa, media companies spent much of the last decade running from print. Rising production costs, shrinking ad budgets, and the seductive promise of digital reach made the medium an easy villain. But as audiences crave more tactile, immersive experiences, publications like Culture Custodian are returning to the medium, while others, like The Republic and The Africa Report, never truly left.

2. The collector item playbook

More than a publishing experiment, this return to print is a branding play. For publications, the move to print is less about chasing mass readership and more about creating something tangible that reflects the care, craft, and cultural authority their digital presence has built over time.

At the heart of this is the collector-item strategy. These magazines are designed to be owned, not discarded. Every edition is treated as an object of value: limited runs, heavyweight paper, meticulous art direction, and slow, thoughtful curation. Each issue becomes both a time capsule and a design statement—a piece of art worth holding onto.

“We want this to be the ultimate collector’s item,” Oluwamayowa Idowu, Culture Custodian’s Editor-in-Chief, told Communiqué. “We are not trying to do a magazine every quarter. For us, this is a once-a-year thing where we’re going to create something that we feel is very representative of where culture is at that time, in that day, in that age.”

With this collector-item strategy, magazines can offer something digital media can’t: a break from the endless scroll. Online, content moves fast and disappears quickly. But print slows things down. Each issue invites readers to sit with stories, flip through pages, and really take in the work. No algorithms or notifications are competing for attention. Instead, readers get a calm, focused experience. For people tired of constant digital noise, print feels like a way to pause, something tangible they can hold on to and return to whenever they want.

While print sales may never again be the primary revenue driver for publications, the medium has found new value as a powerful branding tool. It signals permanence, credibility, and taste. For readers, owning a physical copy feels like belonging to a cultural circle, where the magazine itself is the membership card. This sense of exclusivity is especially attractive to advertisers, who are willing to pay a premium for it.

“In an age of fragmented feeds and programmatic targeting, the carefully edited, tactile experience of a premium print issue gives brands cultural weight and a halo of credibility,” Cherry Collins, Strategy Partner at Havas Media UK, said in an interview with Vogue Business.

3. A global reckoning

This return to print is part of a broader global shift in how publishers think about physical media. Around the world, major titles are reimagining print as a premium experience. Starting in 2026, Vogue will reduce its U.S. print schedule from a monthly cadence to eight issues per year—each one larger, weightier, and tied to cultural moments like the Met Gala and Vogue World. “Our eight issues will deliver more impact—not only for our subscribers, but also for our advertisers who are reaching a deeply dedicated audience and staying with them longer,” said Vogue’s Global Editorial Director, Mark Guiducci, in an interview.

Its sister publication, Vanity Fair, is taking a similar route, producing eight annual editions—four seasonal and four thematic.

Digital-native platforms are following suit. The Cut, which began as a purely online publication, now publishes a biannual print magazine with collectable covers and hosts live reader events, such as The Cut Café during New York Fashion Week. Nylon also revived its print edition in 2024 after seven years online.

4. Building a premium experience

In building a premium brand experience, print magazine issues are just one part of the equation. The second part is premium, well-curated events. These events bring the brand’s aesthetic and community to life.

To launch The Custodian, Culture Custodian hosted a launch party in the UK—an intimate gathering that doubled as the publication’s official introduction to the British audience. It plans a similar event for November in Nigeria, reinforcing the magazine’s connection to its home base.

Similarly, Jeune Afrique Media Group, for example, anchored its 2021–2025 strategy on two pillars: first, shifting from a weekly print edition to a niche quarterly magazine; and second, building out a portfolio of high-end events. In addition to its long-running Africa CEO Forum, the group launched the African Financial Industry Summit in 2021, now one of the leading platforms connecting finance, policy, and technology leaders across the continent. These gatherings deepen audience loyalty and open new revenue streams through sponsorships and partnerships.

For digital publications aiming to build enduring brands, the modern premium media playbook follows a clear sequence. The journey begins online, where digital platforms help build an audience. Print follows to anchor that voice in credibility, craft, and identity. Then come events, which transform that authority into community and experience.

It’s not about choosing one medium over another—it’s about sequencing them for maximum cultural and commercial impact. In a world where attention is fleeting, premium media brands are discovering that sometimes, the most powerful way forward is to slow down—publish less, say more, and make it matter.

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1. For media organisations looking to hire journalism talent, UCJ is a credible talent pool.

2. UCJ’s evolution highlights the power of peer learning, mentorship, and curiosity-driven practice in shaping adaptable, values-led journalists.

3. As media industries across Africa confront questions of credibility and capacity, UCJ offers a model for how passion-driven ecosystems can sustain the future of journalism from the ground up.

1. From Accra with love

For three days every October, Accra becomes the capital of West African journalism. Reporters and editors from across the subcontinent gather for the West Africa Media Excellence Conference and Awards (WAMECA), a yearly convergence that has grown into the region’s most credible celebration of press freedom and journalistic excellence.

The three-day event unfolds through plenary sessions, workshops, and panel discussions that explore the region’s most significant media challenges, from digital transformation and press freedom to the ethics of AI and investigative reporting.

But by the final day, when the lights dim for the awards ceremony, the gathering begins to feel distinctly Nigerian. The red-carpet interviews are dotted with familiar accents, the nominees’ list reads like a map of Nigeria’s journalism ecosystem, and as the winners are announced, you already know which country sweeps home the awards.

This year was no different. Nigerians submitted 47% of the entries and took home several of the top prizes, including the coveted West Africa Reporter of the Year Award. Kunle Adebajo, HumAngle’s former investigations editor, won this award for his story investigating the funding of a secessionist group in Eastern Nigeria. It was the second time in a row that a HumAngle writer had won the award. In 2023 (WAMECA skipped 2024), Temitayo Akinyemi, HumAngle’s former interactive editor, won the prize for his story detailing the environmental damage of illegal oil refining in Port Harcourt, a city in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta.

Apart from being HumAngle employees at the time they wrote the stories that won them the awards, Adebajo and Akinyemi had something else in common: neither had received a traditional media education. Their journalism careers began years earlier, in university, as members of the Union of Campus Journalists (UCJ). This student-led press body has quietly become one of Nigeria’s most effective journalism training grounds.

In the hierarchy of Nigeria’s journalism pipeline, the UCJ sits firmly outside the formal system. It doesn’t confer degrees or run accredited courses. Yet, its alumni have gone on to populate bylines, newsrooms, and editorial desks across local and international media organisations, including Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Guardian UK, CNN, Premium Times, The Republic, Big Cabal Media, and the Associated Press.

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2. The origins of a journalist factory

If you take UCJ as an umbrella term for all campus journalism associations in Nigeria, then the first was established in 1963 at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), then known as the University of Ife. It was called the Association of Campus Journalists (ACJ), a student-led press body created to hold the university administration accountable and promote intellectual debate on campus. But the first union to actually bear the name Union of Campus Journalists (UCJ) was founded at the University of Ibadan (UI) in 1987. From Ibadan, the model spread across the country to Ilorin, Nsukka, Sokoto and beyond. Becoming a network of student newsrooms that mirrored the values and tensions of Nigeria’s mainstream press.

Over the decades, UCJ chapters have become training grounds for some of the country’s most accomplished journalists and editors. Notable alumni include Dapo Olorunyomi, co-founder and publisher of Premium Times, and Fisayo Soyombo, founder of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ).

Yet what’s even more striking about the UCJ’s legacy is that many of its most successful alumni never studied Mass Communication or Media Studies. Dapo Olorunyomi read Literature at Obafemi Awolowo University — a discipline that you could consider journalism-adjacent — but Fisayo Soyombo studied Animal Science at the University of Ibadan, a course far removed from the world of news and storytelling. This pattern repeats itself across generations: some of Nigeria’s finest journalists began as outsiders to the formal study of journalism.

3. The outsider advantage

The idea of the Outsider Advantage helps explain why UCJ members often outperform traditional journalism students. Although not formally defined in academic literature, the concept draws from the ideas Colin Wilson proposed in his book The Outsider (1956). He argued that people who exist outside established systems often possess a unique creative edge. Stripped of institutional conditioning, outsiders tend to see problems differently, questioning conventions rather than inheriting them.

In the context of journalism, this translates into curiosity unbound by classroom theory and a willingness to experiment with storytelling, tone, and investigative depth.

For UCJ members, this advantage is evident in their approach to learning through hands-on experience. Without the structure of a Mass Communication curriculum, they build their craft through self-education, mentorship, and relentless practice; breaking news stories on student governance and editing sharp opinion pieces on university management long before entering professional spaces. This blend of autonomy and pressure cultivates adaptability and critical thinking, qualities that often define great reporters.

“The UCJ UNILORIN workshops, events and congresses are like the muscle that piled up to pivot the kind of journalism I am doing today,” Pelumi Salako said in an interview with the International Centre for Journalists in 2021. Salako would eventually go on to win the 2024 Future Awards Prize in Journalism. By approaching journalism as a practice rather than a prescribed discipline, UCJ members grow into storytellers who are trained by experience, not just instruction. In this way, their outsider status becomes their greatest strength, a source of originality, resilience, and a more profound sense of purpose that often sets them apart from their formally trained peers.

Because they lacked formal training in journalism, UCJ members often grew up outside the traditions of Nigerian newsrooms, and that distance shaped how they learned the craft. Deprived of the local industry’s conventions, they turned instead to foreign publications for guidance. “Because we were not Mass Communication students, we did not know how journalism was practised in Nigerian newsrooms. We were reading publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post and learning from them,” Temitayo Akinyemi told Communiqué. For Akinyemi, this kind of aspirational mimicry became an education in itself, helping refine his taste and sharpen his editorial instincts. His investigation, All Die Na Die, which won the 2023 WAMECA West Africa Reporter of the Year Award, was modelled after The Washington Post’s Africa’s Rising Cities project, a long-form, multimedia exploration of urban transformation across the continent.

4. Only true believers need apply

Another thing UCJ has going for it is that it attracts people who actually want to study journalism. In Nigeria, Law is the premier course for arts and humanities students. However, limited spaces in universities mean that not everyone who applies is accepted. As a compromise, many are placed in other courses, Mass Communication being a common fallback. The result is that Mass Communication departments across the country are filled with students who never intended to become journalists in the first place.

“A lot of Mass Communication students are just there to earn a living, not necessarily because they’re passionate about journalism. And that’s why you find that when many of them leave school, they tend to focus on the PR and Communication part of it, which is more lucrative, rather than public-interest journalism. But UCJ is different because you apply voluntarily,” Adebajo told Communiqué.

There have been efforts to fix this problem. In 2020, Nigeria’s National Universities Commission (NUC) issued a directive to unbundle the Mass Communication degree, breaking it into seven specialised programmes: Journalism and Media Studies, Public Relations, Advertising, Broadcasting, Film and Multimedia Studies, Development Communication Studies, and Information and Media Studies. The goal was to create clearer professional pathways and align academic curricula with industry realities. But implementation has been slow. Many universities lack the resources or faculty to run all seven programmes at once.

Some institutions have made progress. Covenant University has scaled down its traditional Mass Communication programme to make room for newer specialisations. The University of Lagos remains the only institution to fully comply with the directive. In June this year, the university upgraded its Department of Mass Communication into a Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, housing all seven degree programmes.

Still, for most universities, journalism education remains trapped in an outdated model, one where theory outweighs practice, and pragmatism often replaces passion. It’s in that vacuum that UCJ thrives.

5. A double-edged pen

For all its strengths, the UCJ isn’t without its limitations. It leans heavily on opinion writing rather than core news reporting. This helps young journalists develop their voice but leaves many underprepared for the rigour of professional newsrooms, where structure, objectivity, and sourcing matter more than style.

Also, the focus on commentary often brings UCJ members into conflict with university authorities. Kunle Adebajo experienced this firsthand when he was rusticated for two semesters in his final year at the University of Ibadan after publishing an article critical of the school. Unable to proceed to Law School with his peers, he turned to journalism full-time. Fisayo Soyombo, then an editor at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, was helpful in this transition, giving him his first professional newsroom job. It was in this role that Adebajo won his first WAMECA award, for Best Story in Telecoms and ICT Reporting, in 2019.

Another limitation is UCJ’s narrow focus on print and text-based storytelling. Members rarely explore other forms of journalism, such as broadcast journalism. As the media landscape shifts toward digital and cross-platform formats, this gap risks leaving the next generation of UCJ journalists less equipped for the demands of modern storytelling. Some chapters of the UCJ have begun to address this problem, starting YouTube channels where members can experiment with video journalism.

UCJ’s enduring influence raises important questions about the future of journalism education in Nigeria. If the most effective training ground exists outside the official university system, what does that say about how schools teach journalism?

UCJ’s model proves that mentorship, experimentation, and peer-driven learning are crucial to developing competent journalists, characteristics that university departments can incorporate in improving their Mass Communication degree programmes. For UCJ, however, the challenge is sustainability; ensuring that campus journalism receives the institutional support, resources, and protection it needs to continue producing talent.

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Why this matters

• Audience-led evolution: Akili’s transition from Akili Kids to Akili TV shows the power of listening to one’s audience and evolving with them, a critical lesson for any African media brand seeking longevity.

• Solving for representation: Akili’s origin story underscores a long-standing gap, the absence of African children seeing themselves on screen and how addressing that gap creates both cultural and commercial value.

• Building for the future: Akili’s growth proves that Africa can create world-class media brands that nurture identity, strengthen family bonds, and shape the next generation’s relationship with storytelling.

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1. The rebrand

In November 2024, Akili Kids, Kenya’s largest children’s television station, officially rebranded as Akili TV. The rebrand marked the station’s evolution from a children’s channel into a full-fledged family entertainment brand designed to accompany its primary viewers as they grow older.

The decision came directly from the audience. Parents who once tuned in only for their toddlers were now asking for shows they could enjoy together. Teenagers wanted relatable African stories, while caregivers longed for programming that encouraged bonding, not just learning. Akili’s rebrand was an answer to those requests, a realisation that childhood doesn’t exist in isolation, and that the best children’s content is often the kind the whole family can share.

In many ways, Akili’s evolution offers a blueprint for building media products for children and how those products can mature alongside their audiences. It’s a crucial lesson for Africa, where more than 60% of the population is under the age of 25, and where the next generation’s media diet is still forming.

In just five years, the channel has grown into Kenya’s largest provider of children’s television, reaching more than 18 million viewers, a trajectory reminiscent of Nickelodeon’s rise in the US, but rooted firmly in African experiences, languages, and values.

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2. There in the beginning

Akili TV’s story began with two media executives, Jeff Schon and Jesse Soleil, who had spent decades shaping content for young audiences, from television and animation to digital learning. The pair first met at Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s publisher, where they helped pioneer some of the company’s earliest educational technology products.

In the mid-2000s, Soleil began spending time in Kenya, where his wife is from. There, he saw an opportunity. As television ownership was growing in the country, millions of Kenyan children were consuming global networks like Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. Yet, few of those shows reflected African stories or everyday experiences. Recognising the gap, Soleil invited his longtime collaborator, Schon, to join him in exploring what a truly Kenyan children’s media product might look like.

Before settling on television, Schon and Soleil considered different formats through which to reach children — including storybooks and mobile phones, which were growing exponentially across the continent — but ultimately decided that TV offered the broadest and most immediate reach across Kenya. “TV is still the main platform for families to consume content. Especially when you think about the rural areas, which is where the larger population of Kenya resides,” Jeff Schon, Akili’s CEO, told Communiqué.

The initial idea was to create a small programming block for children on one of Kenya’s major broadcasters. But the TV networks would demand advertising revenue and payment for broadcast airtime upfront, even before any content started airing, making the model unsustainable. Around the same time, Kenya was preparing to migrate from analogue to digital broadcasting, a process that opened new television licenses for the first time in years. The Communications Authority of Kenya was intrigued by the idea of a dedicated children’s channel. Even though the licensing process had officially closed, the Authority made an exception, allowing Schon and Soleil to apply.

Akili received its license in 2012, but it would take eight more years for the channel to launch. The Communications Authority of Kenya’s enthusiastic support did not come with capital, and traditional investors were reluctant to back the idea. Most thought it was too risky or too niche. In 2019, Akili finally secured $2.4 million in funding from a consortium that included Geraldine Laybourne, former president of Nickelodeon and Disney’s ABC Cable Networks.

3. A lockdown launch

When Akili Kids launched in March 2020 — just three weeks after Kenya went into lockdown — its timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. With schools closed and millions of children stuck at home, parents urgently sought ways to keep them engaged. Akili filled that gap perfectly, offering educational entertainment content rooted in local culture and language. Within six months, it reached 4 million Kenyan children, becoming the second most-watched TV station by children in the country, surpassed only by Citizen TV, the country’s largest broadcaster.

Akili carefully segments its programming by age and time of day to meet the developmental and educational needs of children. The preschool block runs early mornings with three hours of literacy, numeracy, and science content, which parents say effectively prepares children for school. Midday programming targets ages 4 to 8, featuring shows that nurture communication, empathy, and confidence, skills that complement formal education.

Among its most popular shows is Akili and Me, an animated series that teaches children numeracy, literacy, and emotional intelligence through relatable African characters and stories. Ubongo Kids, another favourite licensed from Tanzania, blends problem-solving with storytelling. Other shows include Wild Kratts, Super Sema, and Team Umizoomi. Together, these programs have become central to Akili’s identity.

By late afternoon, as older children return from school, the channel caters to preteens and teenagers with relatable shows that explore issues such as bullying, self-esteem, and identity; some of the most pressing issues affecting children of that age group.

This sensitivity to context was most visible during the 2024 Kenyan protests, when young viewers were exposed to scenes of unrest and uncertainty. Rather than ignore the moment, Akili introduced civic-themed segments that explained the protests in simple, age-appropriate ways. “We knew kids were watching and wondering,” Anne Sato, Akili’s head of programming, said to Communiqué. “As much as we don’t do news on our channel, we realized there was need to create awareness of what protests are and how can we make them peaceful. Because children learn through imitating and when they watch news and see what is happening, they think that is how it should be. So our role at Akili was to educate them on what is happening, but also how can it happen in a peaceful and more respectful way.”

Shows on the network are available in English, Kiswahili, and Kenyan Sign Language, ensuring that deaf children are not excluded. A recent GeoPoll survey found that Digital Storytime, a sign language program, was the most-watched show on the channel.

4. The business strategy behind the fun

Over its lifetime, Akili has raised $9 million, with a significant portion — roughly $1.5 million — going into content licensing. At launch, only 15% of its programming was African-made, but that figure has since grown to 50%, thanks to partnerships with regional studios such as Tanzania’s Ubongo Kids, Nigeria’s EVCL studios, and Uganda’s Peripheral Vision International.

The station remains free-to-air, meaning its primary source of revenue is advertising. But Akili is deliberate about the type of products it advertises, maintaining strict standards to ensure that ads align with its educational and family values. “We wouldn’t take advertisement from high sugars or, betting companies.

Beyond advertising, the company is now fundraising for expansion, including plans to launch more digital products that could introduce subscription-based revenue streams.

While children remain its core audience, Akili’s growing focus on family-friendly programming during prime time reflects a deliberate strategy, one that has long been employed by major broadcasters around the world, and most recently by Nigeria’s national broadcaster as it attempts to reinvent itself. The logic is simple: family-oriented content builds trust, loyalty, and sustained viewership across generations.

In Communiqué 37, we noted that “one of the most significant advantages of producing content for kids is guaranteed loyalty. Establish a brand relationship with a kid at a young age, and you can be confident you have their attention for several years.” But that benefit extends beyond the child. By earning the trust and engagement of children, a media brand also gains influence over the entire household. Children are key decision-shapers within families, and Akili TV’s evolution into a family network positions it to deepen that relationship, transforming childhood viewership into family-wide loyalty.

For Akili TV, this next chapter isn’t just about expanding its audience. It’s about proving that Africa can build media brands that grow with their viewers, shape values, and tell stories that reflect the continent’s own realities.

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1. NAG illustrates how legacy media brands can reinvent themselves through strategic pivots, in this case from mass publishing to premium collectible editions.

2. NAG’s trajectory shows the long term value of building community-driven brands on cultural relevance and audience trust.

3. Like NAG, media companies can achieve sustainable growth by diversifying across different platforms including print, digital, and events.

1. The return of the NAG Mag

Every year for the last two decades — except for a brief pause during the pandemic — rAge Expo, Africa’s largest gaming event, has been the heartbeat of South Africa’s gaming ecosystem.

For three days every December, it transforms a convention centre into a temple. The halls are packed with product launches, hardware demos, cosplay parades, and marathon gaming sessions that run late into the night. You can test new games, join tournaments, or meet the people building the next big titles.

But in 2023, the convention offered something different. Amid the energy of demos, tournaments, and tech displays, NAG, South Africa’s foremost gaming publication, made a long-awaited return to print. For the first time in nearly a decade, fans could once again hold in their hands the glossy pages that once defined South African gaming culture.

The comeback was more than symbolic. For many, NAG was where their love for gaming began. Before YouTube and Twitch, NAG told South African gamers what to play, what to buy, and where the culture was heading. Driven by nostalgia, fans lined up to secure their copies, and the limited-edition magazines quickly sold out.

In a space now dominated by streaming and social media, NAG’s return to print felt like a full-circle moment for South Africa, a reminder that before it became digital, the country’s gaming ecosystem was built on paper, ink, and imagination. And for nearly three decades, this niche yet influential publication has been at the forefront.

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2. South Africa’s first gaming publication

When New Age Gaming (NAG) Magazine launched its first issue in April 1998, it filled a gap no one else had thought to address. At the time, there was no local gaming publication anywhere in Africa. The only options were imported magazines, like PC Format from the UK. The problem was that these magazines were expensive and lacked local context; the reviews were of games and gadgets unavailable in South Africa, and prices were listed in foreign currencies. For gamers, it was frustrating to read about new titles and hardware they could never actually buy.

The idea for NAG was born by a group of friends in a Johannesburg internet café, known as Cyber Nation. Gamers would spend hours there playing games and asking about the latest releases. One of the café’s founders, Len Nery, and his team realised there was a need for a publication that spoke directly to South African gamers.

A few months after the first issue hit the stands, Michael James, an avid gamer, came across a copy of NAG while visiting a mall. Inside, he noticed an advert for an upcoming gaming competition and immediately wanted in. But beyond competing, James wanted to be part of the NAG team. He sent a cold email to the editors, offering to write for them. James started as a freelancer, then joined full-time as an editor before becoming editor-in-chief and co-owner of NAG. Under his leadership, NAG began to take shape as the industry’s defining publication.

NAG had one key responsibility: to give South African gamers honest and valuable information in a market that was still taking shape. That meant deep dives into gaming culture, coverage of the early e-sports scene, and sometimes scathing product reviews. “If a product wasn’t worth your money, we said so,” Nery told Communiqué. “That responsibility rested heavily on our shoulders.” In that way, they earned the trust of the local gaming community.

At the time, internet access was slow and expensive, limiting access to games. Each issue of NAG came with a cover CD containing demos of the latest releases. For many readers, that CD was their only gateway to the global gaming world, and it helped grow NAG’s readership. “Our readership basically doubled overnight by adding a CD to the magazine,” James told Communiqué.

Beginning in the early 2000s, local South African gaming studios began to find commercial success abroad. Their focus on making games for international markets—which preferred platforms like PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox, rather than for African mobile audiences—attracted investment, partnerships, and skill development to the local ecosystem. NAG sat at the centre of this growth, connecting players, developers, and hardware makers.

3. A break in transmission

Recognising the role it played in the ecosystem, NAG set out to create a space where gamers, hardware manufacturers, and developers could meet face-to-face. The result was the Really Awesome Gaming Event (rAge Expo). “We wanted to connect the end user directly to the companies that made the products,” Nery told Communiqué. “At the time, there was no direct line between the people who built gaming tech and the people who actually used it.”

The first rAge Expo was held in 2002, attracting around 4,000 attendees. By the fifth edition, the event had become profitable. Today, the rAge Expo attracts over 40,000 attendees annually.

But while the expo thrived, NAG’s print business began to struggle. The early 2010s were tough years for media worldwide, as the internet upended traditional publishing models. For NAG, the challenge was particularly sharp. Its core audience — young, tech-savvy gamers — was among the first to move online, and advertisers soon followed, shifting their budgets from print to digital. At its peak in the early 2010s, the magazine’s monthly print run reached 35,000 copies, but by 2015 it had fallen to around 15,000 as declining ad revenue made it harder to sustain production costs.

In June 2015, NAG published its final print issue, officially transitioning to a fully digital publication. Just a year earlier, PC Format, the UK magazine that once dominated the market, had also shut down. NAG’s closure marked the end of an era, foreshadowing the collapse of South Africa’s broader magazine industry. The crisis peaked in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, when major publishers like Caxton Publishers and Associated Media Publishing closed up shop, taking with them over 20 magazine titles.

For NAG, 2020 was also a challenging year. For the first time in nearly two decades, the rAge Expo did not hold. The pandemic also forced a pivotal shift within the company itself. NAG and rAge, which had operated under one umbrella, formally separated.

The separation came down to a difference in vision. Michael James remained optimistic that physical events would quickly return, while Nery felt the recovery would take years and the business would not survive waiting out the pandemic. The two agreed to divide the company’s assets and audiences. James took Instagram and YouTube, while Nery retained Facebook and Twitter (now X).

Although the assets have been divided, the NAG brand remains unified. On the one hand, Michael James has transformed the NAG YouTube channel into a sleek digital hub for South Africa’s gaming community, complete with MKBHD-style product reviews, interviews with creators, and deep dives into gaming culture. On the other hand, Len Nery has led NAG back to where it all began: print.

4. NAG’s collector item strategy

Today, NAG reaches more than 400,000 gamers across its digital platforms, a far cry from what Nery calls “the dark ages” of 2015–2016, when the magazine nearly disappeared.

After years as a digital-only outlet, NAG’s limited-edition 2023 print issue marked a nostalgic return to its roots. Only 10,000 copies were printed, each designed as a collector’s item.

Len Nery is now betting on the collector-item strategy to rebuild NAG’s print business, a model that treats each issue not as mass media, but as a premium artefact for true fans. By keeping the print run small and focusing on high-quality design, exclusive features, and limited ad space, NAG turns each issue into something worth owning.

Building on the success of its 2023 and 2024 editions, NAG plans to expand from an annual to a quarterly print schedule, giving readers more opportunities to collect and connect with the brand in physical form. However, much of that will depend on the performance of the 2025 edition, set to launch at this year’s rAge Expo in December.

Editor’s Note:
An earlier version of this story did not include the role of shifting advertising spend in NAG’s print decline. This version has been updated to reflect how advertisers’ move from print to digital media contributed to the magazine’s challenges in the early 2010s.

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• The festival is building a community and knowledge base, creating an entry point for startups, investors, and entrepreneurs to shape Africa’s creative economy around AI.

• Early involvement allows stakeholders to shape ethical standards, intellectual property frameworks, and monetization models that will define the future

1. Africa’s AI debut

Earlier in September, hundreds of filmmakers and technologists gathered at Alliance Française in Lagos for a milestone event: Africa’s first AI film festival. The programme featured a global showcase of AI-assisted films, panel discussions on the future of AI filmmaking, a showcase of local AI tools, and an awards night to recognise outstanding work.

The finalists were chosen by a jury that reflected both global expertise and local experience, including international filmmaker Dana Verde, Uche Okiya, senior animation lecturer at the Del York Creative Academy, Anthony Adah, professor of film studies, actress and director Ronya Man, and Moniepoint’s former creative director, Yemi Arawore.

The festival climaxed with an awards ceremony. Godzilla in Lagos, a five-minute short from AI film studio Nirvs AI, took home the prize for Best AI Long-Form Film. The film reimagined Godzilla through a distinctly African lens, blending the spectacle of Hollywood with the chaos and character of Lagos. That fusion hinted at the radical potential of AI for African cinema: to lower barriers in production and allow African storytellers to compete on the same canvas as their global peers without waiting for the budgets or infrastructure typically required for traditional filmmaking. The Naija AI Film Festival was the platform making this potential a reality.

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2. The backstory

Earlier this April, Nigeria witnessed another first. Makemation, the country’s first AI-assisted feature film, premiered in cinemas with a star-studded cast that included Richard Mofe-Damijo, Shaffy Bello, and Jide Kosoko. Within four days, the film grossed ₦32 million at the box office, climbing to third place nationwide, just behind Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Ori: The Rebirth.

But even as Makemation was making waves on the big screen, Obinna Okerekeocha, film producer and convener of the Naija AI Film Festival, was making plans for the future of AI-assisted filmmaking on the continent. Just days earlier, on his birthday, he had quietly launched the Naija AI Film Festival.

Okerekeocha’s journey into filmmaking stretches back nearly two decades, beginning with his work at NN24, Nigeria’s first 24-hour news channel. As part of the pioneer staff, he honed his skills in round-the-clock media production. That early immersion in broadcast television would later serve as a foundation for his transition to the entertainment and film industry.

His most defining stint came at RED TV, where he spent seven years as creative director. There, he worked on birthing some of Nigeria’s most notable digital-first shows, serving as executive and creative producer on titles like The Men’s Club, Assistant Madams, Inspector K, and a range of docuseries and reality programmes. That period established him within Nigeria’s content and filmmaking space.

At the same time, Nollywood was in flux. Streaming platforms were recalibrating their strategies in Nigeria, pulling back from aggressive investments just as AI was disrupting the global film industry. Okerekeocha believed that once the dust settled, AI would play a vital role across the filmmaking value chain, from talent discovery to production and even distribution. Yet there was no platform on the continent to explore this convergence. The Naija AI Film Festival was his answer. He began by building a community of AI filmmakers across Africa before opening submissions for the festival. The first edition of the festival received 490 submissions from across the world.

3. Taking a page from the Runway playbook

In 2023, AI startup Runway launched the world’s first AI Film Festival to showcase films made with generative AI tools. Over the last two years, the festival has grown exponentially. The first edition received only 300 submissions, but the most recent edition, held in June, received over 6,000 submissions with screenings in New York and Los Angeles. Ten films were selected for the festival, including More Tears Than Harm, by Malagasy filmmaker Herinarivo Rakotomanana. Following the success of the festival, IMAX struck a deal with Runway to show the films in cinemas across 10 cities in the US.

Earlier this year, the Oscars officially clarified that it would treat films made with AI the same as traditional films, signalling a global acceptance of AI as a part of the filmmaking process.

But in Africa, despite successes like Makemation, adoption has been more cautious. In Nigeria in particular, a 2024 survey of film and television professionals by DLA Piper Africa, a consortium of law firms, found that 35% already use generative AI tools in their work, while another 35% were considering adoption. The Naija AI Film Festival aims to speed things up.

Film festivals have always been more than film screenings. They serve as laboratories where art, commerce, and culture collide to help enable a particular subculture of filmmaking. For instance, Sundance legitimised independent filmmaking and Cannes positioned cinema as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. The Naija AI Film Festival took its first steps toward establishing a similar framework for AI-assisted storytelling, thereby defining its role in the continent’s creative economy.

At its core, the festival was about showing what was possible. Filmmakers who use AI tools to write dialogue, render characters, and generate worlds were validated. Their works, no longer dismissed as gimmicks, were placed in conversation with human-made films and debated in panels about creativity and ownership. The festival also served as an industry showcase for local AI tools such as Switch Studio and AIstudio.ng. It also included Gen Jam, a training session where attendees were taught AI filmmaking techniques and allowed to create an AI film from scratch within four hours. Similarly, Runway hosts Gen 48, a rapid-fire filmmaking challenge that provides participants with free access to its AI tools for 48 hours to create a short film from scratch.

More critically, the festival created space to debate the policy and ethical issues—such as copyright, labour, and authenticity—that will shape the medium’s future. Media and entertainment lawyer Foza Fawehinmi, speaking on a panel about the ethical use of AI, emphasised the need to incorporate African source material in AI training models before focusing on monetisation. “If our stories are not included, these tools will not serve African creators. It’s not always about who gets what or who gets paid.”

4. The endgame

But beyond the festival, the real work lies in what comes after. For Okerekeocha, that work is rooted in community. Since its inception in April, the Naija AI Film community has grown to more than 500 members across the continent, creating an environment where filmmakers can learn and experiment with AI, supported by shared resources, guest lectures, and weekly portfolio reviews.

Okerekeocha is now moving to standardise that learning experience with a structured training platform. “We are building a portal where African filmmakers can learn AI filmmaking in one month, through modules that touch on the most important aspects of AI filmmaking from an African point of view.”

He wants to unlock the ability for African filmmakers to tell unique African stories. “I tell my community members, you are not learning AI to go and do the next Avatar film or the next James Bond. What are the African stories that have not yet been told that you can make with technology?”

That question—what stories have not yet been told—is what gives the Naija AI Film Festival its significance. It is less about the novelty of a new technology and more about its potential to widen the canvas for African storytelling. The festival was just the beginning; the real story is in what comes after.

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