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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came 2020, his annus mirabilis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The environment he grew up in made that almost inevitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His first voiceover job came a few months later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I promised myself that any money I’m going to make has to be with my biro or with my brain.”

You might know Abayomi Semudara, “Bayomi,” from his videos breaking down tech industry news, or his game show Byte or Bail, or his Baraza events bringing together founders across African cities. For someone who started creating content out of boredom, that is an impressive portfolio. But impressive is what Bayomi does. His entire trajectory has been powered by a dogged refusal to settle for mediocrity.

Bayomi grew up on the outskirts of Lagos. Born to a primary school teacher and a trader. They didn’t have all the luxury things, but they had the necessities: food on the table and the means to attend school. And quite early, he realised that he could not follow the script that people around him did. After secondary school, most got married, learned tailoring, or took up carpentry. “I didn’t want that kind of life for myself,” he says.

His unlikely inspiration was Lex Luthor from Smallville, not the villainy, but the proof that intelligence and effort could unlock a different life. However, getting himself to that point wasn’t as straightforward as he would have liked.

He was smart. At his secondary school in Eti-Osa, the academic results had been dismal for years. Teachers told him after his WAEC results: in the past five years, not a single student had passed with five credits, including English and mathematics. Bayomi did it. A1 in commerce, B3 in financial accounts, and credits across the board. He was the first in half a decade to clear that bar.

“I considered myself one of the smartest in school,” he says plainly. “I just didn’t like being mediocre. The people writing this exam in other schools were passing. They didn’t have five heads. It’s the same exam. It just depends on how well you studied.”

After secondary school, he took a job as a motor-boy, loading 25-litre oil cans across Lagos markets. He lasted two days. His body was not built for physical labour. That is when he made his promise: any money would come from his pen or his brain. He cycled through other jobs while studying for JAMB, the entrance test for prospective higher-ed students in Nigeria: a pump attendant, a hotel front-desk assistant, and a cleaner at a Chevron Estate. Each job helped him stack up savings for his tertiary education.

He got admission to Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, in 2013, two years after he graduated from secondary school but when an eight-month strike stalled his education, he applied to the University of Lagos. This time he chose to study Educational Management, hoping to fix the rot in the system. He arrived at the University of Lagos as one of the top five in his cohort. But by the second year, his course work was no longer challenging. “I saw those things as something that if I woke up in the middle of the night before my exam and read, I’d still get a B or C.” He stopped prioritising the degree and started teaching himself design. First motion design, but his laptop could not handle the software, so he pivoted to brand design. Logos for classmates, then clients beyond campus. Before long, he told his family to stop sending pocket money.

In 2021, after his compulsory national service year, Bayomi made a public pitch on LinkedIn to Gradely, an edtech company he admired. They never responded. But Honey Ogundeyi, founder of Edukoya, saw his pitch and reached out. He was one of the earliest employees and spent a year and a half doing more than design: branding, user interface, marketing, and video production. His title resisted definition: lead designer and head of experimentation. When Edukoya raised $3.5 million, he designed the pitch decks.

Eventually, he got tired. He resigned, retrained in product design, freelanced for Recital Finance and Front Edge, and now leads design at a Ghanaian fintech helping global companies collect payments from Africa. He prefers not to name them. “They don’t make noise.” For a long time, neither did he.

Posting online content, as he is known for now, started without a plan. He started doing it when he was freelancing because he was bored, had some time on his hands, and wanted to share his observations. His first video was inspired by a tweet about a $30 million raise. He recorded a reaction and posted it. But since then, he hasn’t stopped. “I just kept doing it.”

His formula was simple: find interesting tech news, share his opinion. He trawled TechCabal, Techpoint, TechCrunch, and Twitter. “I find things I find interesting,” he explains. “If it interests me, I share it. If not, I don’t.” When one Sunday of posting three videos produced floods of views, he took note. Three videos daily for eight months straight.

One Sunday, he posted three videos and saw a surge in engagement. The pattern was clear. He increased his output and began posting three videos a day for months. The consistency built an audience.

Even then, he did not immediately see it as a business. He considered himself a designer first. Content was something he did at night, when his primary work was done. The shift in mindset came towards the end of 2025. He read an article about new media and the creative economy. It reframed what he was doing. He realised that he had become one of the more recognisable voices discussing tech in Nigeria. That influence could be structured.

Since then, he has begun thinking in formats. He plans more long-form content and documentaries. He has paid attention to positioning and narrative. He has registered the business, set up proper accounts and assembled a small team. Four people handle events. Two work with him directly.

Some of his experiments have matured into defined products. Byte or Bail is a tech game show that blends trivia with interviews. Founders and operators answer questions as they share their journeys. The show has accumulated over 100,000 views on YouTube. It is not mainstream television, but within its niche, it has found an audience.

Baraza extends his presence offline. It is a series of pop-up events across African cities that bring together founders, venture capitalists, and ecosystem operators. The first edition took place in Kigali. Lagos followed. Abuja, Nairobi, and Accra are part of the roadmap. The ambition is to create a networked community that connects operators across markets. There is also a shorter format in which founders present what they are building in one minute. Over the past year, dozens of startups have been spotlighted through this format.

The through-line in all of this is not a grand strategy. It is curiosity, applied consistently. He tends to follow what interests him, then build around it.

When asked about the larger direction, he does not outline a five-year plan. He returns to something simpler: he pursues what he finds interesting and lets that pursuit shape the outcome. And for now, his focus is on building one of Africa’s leading creator-led media brands.

“I kept on asking the pharmacist, ‘What else do we do? And he was like, this is what we do.’”

Biola Alabi remembers the exact moment she knew she was on the wrong path.

She was working as an intern at a pharmacy in the United States, following the familiar script many children of Nigerian immigrants know too well: pick one of the respectable professions, stay focused, build a stable life. Medicine. Pharmacy. Law. Engineering. Those were the acceptable options.

But as she stood behind the counter, watching prescriptions being filled, she felt restless. She wanted more. That restlessness would lead her to drop her pharmacy degree and go in search of something else.

Today, Alabi is one of Africa’s most influential investors working at the intersection of media and technology. She has been involved in more than 40 companies as an investor, board member, or advisor, including Big Cabal Media and Pulse, two of Africa’s biggest digital media companies. She has backed startups, built television networks, structured venture deals, and helped scale creative ecosystems across the continent.

But the seeds of Alabi’s career in media and investing were planted long before she knew what venture capital was. As a child, moving back and forth between Nigeria and the United States due to Nigeria’s political and economic instability in the 80s, young Alabi learned to create opportunity wherever she landed.

During one Christmas in Nigeria, bored by the lack of organised entertainment for children, she organised neighbourhood plays. She formalised the entire operation, complete with ticket sales and structured rehearsals. Even after she left, the model continued to sustain itself. “This became very big in the neighbourhood,” she recalls. “I was told that when we moved back to the US, the kids kept on doing the plays.”

Alabi went to university to study pharmacy, but she soon grew disillusioned. In looking for a new major, her only requirement was that it fit within her four-year school budget. With the help of the school counsellor, she settled on Public Health because she could later return to medical school. It was during the last two years of her stay on campus that she found something she loved. She took marketing classes and completed courses at a film school because the Public Health curriculum required her to learn about different communication methods. “I took these classes, and it just changed my vision of the world and the opportunities ahead.”

After graduating from university, she ended up in Korea, where she worked in youth marketing for Daewoo cars. Around that time, the car manufacturer was expanding to the United States and was focused on first-time buyers. Alabi was tasked with selling the cars to 16-year-old Americans. “I sort of became a youth marketing expert.”

Around this time, the internet and e-commerce were becoming a thing. She got a job at Bigwords.com, an e-commerce platform targeting students. She was employee number 15, part of the heady first wave of the dot-com era. When Amazon offered to buy the company four years after she joined, the young founders refused. “We’re like, Amazon, who are you? We’re gonna be bigger than Amazon.” Then the crash came, and the company folded, and she was back on the job market.

Fortunately, she landed a role as a project manager at Sesame Street for a trilingual release of their programs in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. The job was her first proper introduction to the media industry. “It was fascinating to work in a company I grew up watching,” she says. Her role soon expanded to managing international co-productions across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

At the time, Sesame Street had only one African co-production, in South Africa. Alabi pushed hard to join that project and later spent six months on the ground helping localise it. She led Sesame Street’s ten-country expansion across Africa, running pilots in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya. Her work during this period required her to strike broadcasting deals in each market, and that posed a huge challenge. “We needed a Pan-African broadcast partner. Doing broadcasting deals in each country was too cumbersome. Every country’s broadcasting ecosystem worked differently.” If the problem was not resolved quickly, she felt it could end Sesame Street’s operations on the continent.

She approached DStv’s parent company, Multichoice, about becoming a Pan-African partner for Sesame Street. Multichoice replied with a counteroffer: come run our Pan-African business. They wanted someone with global experience building global brands, someone who understood both creative excellence and commercial viability. Alabi fit perfectly.

What followed were six transformative years as an executive that taught her much of what she needed to know about scaling creative businesses. When she joined, there was one Africa Magic channel broadcasting five hours a day. When she left, there were eight channels, including indigenous language channels in Yoruba, Hausa, and Swahili.

But the real work wasn’t just launching channels; it was building the entire ecosystem to support them. Launching a channel required scanning markets for available content, negotiating with creators, managing technical teams, hiring schedulers and broadcast engineers. The other side of this was ensuring the content met the required standards. “About 50% of the submitted films weren’t even broadcast-quality,” she recalls. “But we’re not going to have any African content on those channels if we do not override the technical requirements.”

The solution required executive vision: massive investment in infrastructure and training. She helped organise training programmes for scriptwriters, cinematographers and filmmakers. “We spent so much of our budget on training at the beginning,” Alabi recalls.

She also launched the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards and helped transform the Big Brother Africa franchise, expanding it across Francophone and Lusophone countries.

After Multichoice, Alabi joined a telco trying to launch digital platforms and a corporate venture capital arm. The experience was revealing—not for what worked, but for what didn’t. Traditional companies, she learned, struggle with investing in startups. “They’re used to just acquiring…There was always a question like, well, is this an acquisition? Is this an investment?”

But something clicked. “I really got a very strong feeling that there was going to be a big opportunity investing in early-stage technology and media companies,” she says. The question was: could she prove it?

She decided to build a film and TV fund, convincing investors to back a slate of productions to demonstrate the return profile. She produced “Banana Island Ghost,” “Lara and the Beat,” and invested in shows like “Bukas and Joints.” Simultaneously, she began investing in media tech companies. One of those early bets was Big Cabal Media.

“I met the founders on Twitter,” she recalls. “We met at this Africa Tech Summit event where everyone was pitching.” She saw in BCM what she’d seen in Fast Company years earlier in the US—a platform that could become essential infrastructure for a growing ecosystem. “I really thought that this could be our own Fast Company. And I wrote a check and invested.”

But as she worked on the film fund, a painful realisation emerged. The distribution infrastructure didn’t exist to make the films successful on a global scale. More fundamentally, she realised she didn’t want to be a producer. “It did not bring me joy,” she admits. “I enjoyed investing in a production. I did not enjoy being part of a production.”

It was a crucial moment of self-awareness. As global streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon entered Africa, she could have easily become a first-call producer, making prestigious content and good money. Everyone encouraged it: “You’re so good at this.” But Alabi had learned to ask herself harder questions.

Despite the prestige and impact, she realised she was most energised not by creating content, but by identifying talent, structuring deals, and building the business models that allowed creativity to scale. “I knew I wanted to be on the investing side, I wanted to be spotting talent.”

Today, she has led angel syndicate deals alongside other investors and went on to invest with Acasia Ventures before joining Delta40, where she continues to back African startups. Through Delta40, she invests in climate tech, ad tech, and embedded finance. Meanwhile, in addition to Big Cabal Media, she is also on the board of Pulse Network and Akill TV.

After a career spanning four continents and as many industries, Biola Alabi has found exactly what she likes, and Africa’s creative and technology ecosystems are better for it. In many ways, she has returned to her earliest motivation: to create opportunity wherever she lands. Only now, instead of organising neighbourhood plays, she’s organising capital and networks that allow others to perform on a global stage.

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