“My biggest skill set is that I know how to identify what is cool. I don’t think I can create the coolest things, but I can spot what is cool. And being able to spot it is as good as creating it.”

From childhood, Jide Ojewunmi has understood a fundamental tenet of life: people want things that make them stand out, and he was good at finding those things. At school, he supplied sweets his classmates could not buy at the tuck shop. At university, he sold T-shirts and organised parties. Each venture brought him closer to a career built around recognising what people wanted and finding a way to provide it. Today, that instinct runs through DefEar’s, the talent management and marketing business he founded. Its work spans musicians, content creators, brands and now film.

Ojewunmi grew up in Gbagada, Lagos, in an upper-middle-class family. His parents were accountants who also ran a business together. He spent summers in the UK, swam, rollerbladed and went to Ikoyi Club, where his father was a member. His parents cared deeply about his education and sent him across Lagos to Corona School, Victoria Island, believing it would offer a better environment than Corona Gbagada, which was closer to home.

Corona was fertile ground for creativity, giving pupils room to explore their interests beyond the classroom. Several would go on to make their names in Nigeria’s creative industries. Burna Boy was Ojewunmi’s junior, while Krowd Kontrolla, whom he would later manage, was his classmate. Visual artist Dennis Osadebe was also among the school’s alumni. School life made space for activities beyond the classroom, and pupils took them seriously. “They didn’t let us play with sports and extracurricular activities,” he says. “We did a lot of those, and it was very competitive.”

Ojewunmi’s skill set, however, was more tuned towards business. In boarding school, pupils used vouchers instead of cash. Parents deposited money, which was converted into booklets of ₦50 slips redeemable at the tuck shop. Ojewunmi found another use for them. He brought in contraband sweets and sold them to classmates, and with the proceeds, he bought his first phone. “I’ve always been a hustler.”

While preparing for his SATs, he found another opening. His tutorial centre sold photocopied textbooks, but he knew where to buy the original and make better copies. He began supplying other students at a cheaper rate. When the tutor discovered the competing business, Ojewunmi was expelled.

Behind the enterprise was a change in his family’s circumstances. He began living with his mother, who could not provide all the creature comforts he had become accustomed to. “When you have so much access to money and all of a sudden it’s taken away from you, the reality of life hits you because your taste is still high. But your pocket cannot keep up.” Earning money from his various business pursuits became a way to sustain some of the life he knew.

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Lagos Island was his business school. His grandmother lived close to the market, and visits to her brought him into contact with the traders there. Sometimes, he waited there for his mother to finish work. Walking through the market, he recognised clothes he had seen people wearing elsewhere, now available at lower prices. He began learning where to buy things and what other people might pay for them.

Ojewunmi came to see two sides of his upbringing as complementary. At home, television and access to international media fed his imagination. On Lagos Island, the market sharpened his eye for value. “I was watching Sky Digital at home, and that was feeding my creativity. Then this other side, the street, was feeding my business acumen.”

For university, his mother wanted him outside Lagos, away from its distractions. He went to the University of Ibadan, initially enrolling in civil engineering. About a month into his studies, the university discovered that he had not taken physics in his entrance examination. He was transferred to food technology. He completed the degree, but he had already lost interest in formal education. Instead, he began to focus on business.

His first business was Metro Inc.; he made custom T-shirts and also brought clothes from Lagos Island to sell on campus, using the market knowledge he had acquired. Another venture, Strictly UI, was an unofficial website for students. Ojewunmi worked on it with two friends and brought what he called its social angle: live polls that pitted students against one another in popularity contests. Some people paid to improve their ratings. The feature made the site popular, but it also made it fraught. As students became upset about their results and people discovered who was behind the platform, the situation became threatening, and the group eventually shut it down.

Entertainment offered a more lasting direction. Before university, Ojewunmi had helped organise parties in Lagos with a group of his friends called Blend. In Ibadan, in partnership with a club, he began throwing parties, charging at the door and learning how to draw a crowd. Parties led to artist bookings. Other organisers began asking him to secure performers for their events, paying him a fee for the service. He brought Burna Boy to Ibadan shortly after the singer released his breakout single, “Like to Party”. He also brought 2Baba and organised a Mayorkun concert, where Davido made an appearance.

But he didn’t want to stop at just organising events in Ibadan. “It always rang in my head that anything I did in Ibadan didn’t have the impact like Lagos had,” he said. “And I didn’t want to be a local champion.”

After university, he returned to Lagos and continued working in entertainment, attending events and building on the relationships he had made. Concert promotion had already introduced him to talent management. He first worked with Blackmagic through merchandise, making T-shirts for the musician’s concert. Later, after Ojewunmi brought him to perform at his university and handled the arrangements, Blackmagic asked him to become his manager. The roster of artists he managed grew to include Krowd Kontrolla and Skiibii. For years, the operation was effectively Ojewunmi himself: the person artists and collaborators called to make things happen. Eventually, he wanted to build something that could handle more talent than one manager could.

A trip to Ethiopia with Skiibii gave that ambition a shape. On the trip, he met Damilola “Dapper” Akinwunmi, who was then managing Ice Prince. As two young managers accompanying their artists, they found plenty to discuss. The friendship continued after they returned to Nigeria and soon became a working relationship. Their skills complemented each other. Akinwunmi handled music distribution, while Ojewunmi worked on promotion. When Akinwunmi had a project that needed publicity, he brought it to Ojewunmi.

During one conversation at Akinwunmi’s house, they began discussing the shortage of good talent managers. They imagined building something like Def Jam. At first, they planned to do it together. But Akinwunmi already had his own business, and Ojewunmi wanted something he could develop independently. DefEar’s formally began in 2020. Ojewunmi developed the name with his late brother, drawing partly on the Def Jam reference and the promise that people would eventually hear them. The company gave a structure to work he had spent years doing as an individual. It also gave him room to take on opportunities that did not fit neatly into artist management.

Successful promotions brought enquiries from people outside music. Someone working at a company would hear a song, ask who had pushed it and approach Ojewunmi with a campaign of their own. Could he help promote a jingle? Could he develop a campaign for a brand? The requests slowly turned DefEar’s into a creative agency. Ojewunmi describes it as a 360-degree business spanning talent management, promotions, marketing and merchandising. “It’s an ecosystem that we’ve built that helps everything in the creative economy,” he said.

The move into creator management followed a similar pattern. While trying to promote Skiibii’s “Baddest Boy” remix with Davido on TikTok, he connected with Teniola Oyewole, who was TikTok’s Nigerian country manager at the time. They developed a campaign together that helped the song trend on TikTok, and then began collaborating on other campaigns.

After several campaigns together, Ojewunmi asked Oyewole to join DefEar’s as a partner. She was already mentoring creators; that work developed into managing them. She brought that to DefEar’s and helped establish a division dedicated to representing creators, including Softmadeit, Purplespeedy, Crispdal and r0dn3y.

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Ojewunmi is particular about how these creators are described. He resists calling them “TikTok influencers”, even when the platform accounts for their largest audiences. They work across other platforms, and the label can narrow how people understand their abilities.

His latest venture, DefEar’s Originals, grew from that frustration. Ojewunmi saw that some of the company’s creators wanted opportunities in film, but being known primarily for short-form video made it harder to be taken seriously by the traditional film industry. Rather than wait for someone else to cast them, DefEar’s has begun developing its own films. “If they’re not going to expose your talent to the world,” Ojewunmi said, “we will do it ourselves.”

He is also working on Hustle, a platform to connect brands and creators directly. At the time of the interview, it was still in development. The plan is for brands to send briefs, negotiate with creators and receive completed videos through Hustle.

It is a larger version of the instinct he first exercised at school: notice what people want, understand what stands in their way, and build a route between the two. Back then, it meant finding things his classmates were willing to pay for. Today, it means helping creative talent secure opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach.

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“I really believe in the things I get involved in. That belief inspires a duty of care, a commitment to excellence, and the delusion that it can work. Because without belief, what are we doing here, man?”

For Joey Akan, belief is not a vague idea or a motivational slogan. It is a working principle. It has made him leave well-paying jobs and stay with projects that demanded more than they gave him. For him, the distinction is whether he can still see a reason to keep doing the work. If he stops believing in something, he leaves. “It was fun to do it as long as I believed in it,” he says of his time at Pulse. “I believed in Pulse. I believed in the people around me. And the moment I stopped believing in that, I just walked away.”

That pattern has shaped his career. Akan has worked as a writer, editor, A&R executive, television producer, and media entrepreneur. He has written about African music for local and international publications such as the New York Times, worked at Universal Music, and founded Afrobeats Intelligence, a platform that has grown from a publication into a podcast, video project, and live experience. Now, he is expanding again with The Joey Akan Experience, a wider media project built around conversations with people working across culture and the creative industries.

Akan was born and grew up in Port Harcourt, southern Nigeria. He was orphaned early, and much of his childhood was marked by solitude. He spent much of his time alone, often with books. “I read and read until one day I decided, how about I just create words of my own or stories of my own?”

Books offered escape, but they also taught him how to think. He read mostly novels and was drawn to the way fiction could make a reader hold conflicting ideas at once. They were also accessible. He did not have much money growing up, but books were easier to find than many other forms of entertainment. People discarded them during house moves. They could be borrowed, passed around, and collected.

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Akan studied biochemistry at the University of Uyo after coming through secondary school with a science background. But he never expected the degree to become his career. “I knew biochemistry was not what I wanted to do. Even though I did not know [what].”

He did know, though, that he wanted to write. In his second year, he saved up from his feeding money and bought a laptop. Then he bought an internet modem and went online. The internet opened up a new world. Writing had always carried prestige, especially in newspapers, but Akan was not interested in the traditional route. “The internet gave me blank canvases everywhere to write,” he says. “You can write on Facebook; you can write on WordPress.”

He began publishing essays on Facebook and blogging. He wrote about ideas, art, and the things around him. In his final year, while at a beach in Oron, he received a call from someone recruiting writers for Pulse. “I was having a bottle of Heineken, my phone rang, and some guy with a British accent was courting me for Pulse.” He went through the interview process and was hired while still in school. After graduating, he returned briefly to Port Harcourt before moving to Lagos.

At Pulse, he started as a writer covering general news. He didn’t take long to grow restless. He moved into music because it brought together two things he already loved: writing and art. But he was not satisfied with the kind of entertainment coverage he found around him. Much of it focused on celebrity possessions, scandals, and controversy. He wanted to take the music itself seriously. “When I started, entertainment journalism existed, but I didn’t find enough spaces where people were concerned about the art,” he says.

So he taught himself. He read publications such as The Fader, Complex and DJBooth. He studied music criticism, opinion writing, and long-form reporting. At Pulse, he learned how to distinguish high-traffic stories from high-impact ones, while building his own approach to music journalism. “A lot of the work I did there was self-taught,” he says. “I was teaching myself every day.”

By the time he left Pulse, Akan had established himself as one of Nigeria’s leading music writers. He had built relationships within the industry and earned recognition for his work. But instead of settling into the position he had created for himself, he began looking for the next challenge. Afrobeats was also beginning to travel internationally, and Akan could see a story developing around it. He wanted to help tell that story to a global audience. So he resigned and took a role at Universal Music, which was expanding its presence on the continent.

At Universal, he worked on projects involving artists such as WurlD and Tekno, among others. The attraction wasn’t simply the job itself, but the chance to understand how the machine worked. “What makes a lot of opportunities important for me is how much I could learn from them. So the potential to improve my knowledge base is bigger than anything else.” He learned how the industry operated from the inside, and the experience gave him a deeper understanding of the business he had spent years covering.

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Once he felt he had learned what he needed to learn, however, he became less interested in staying. He had discovered that he did not particularly enjoy “looking under the hood” of the industry from the position he occupied there. Again, the decision was less about whether the opportunity was objectively good and more about whether it remained meaningful to him.

Before he left Pulse, Akan had started writing for international publications. After Universal, he leaned further into freelancing. Working with editors outside Nigeria improved his craft, but it could be exhausting. He pitched stories repeatedly, wrote for uncertain outcomes and waited to be paid. One rejection from Genius stayed with him. He had been commissioned to write a piece, but the publication rejected it twice. The larger problem was that he had grown tired of writing the same introduction to Afrobeats for international audiences. Too many stories began from the same place: African music as a discovery. “I discovered that I’d introduced Afrobeats for way too long,” he says. “It felt like the narrative was stunted and I didn’t enjoy it.”

His friends urged him to launch a Substack publication. He called it Afrobeats Intelligence. It was initially a place to publish opinion pieces, which did reasonably well but didn’t get the response he hoped for. Then he returned to some of the interviews he had accumulated over the years. He published an interview with singer Asa, and the response shifted the project’s direction. “It went crazy. People loved it!” That response showed him what his audience wanted: thoughtful, detailed conversations with artists and cultural figures.

Akan followed that signal. And Afrobeats Intelligence became a space where he could apply the editorial standards he had developed internationally to stories much closer to home. The project expanded gradually. He bought podcast equipment, put them in his car, and began recording audio versions of the interviews he was already conducting for the publication. Eventually, the project expanded into video and a team formed around it.

“There was no grand plan to be this,” Akan says. “The live shows came as an if, as a natural order of things. You do things online, people love it, people identify with it. And you could put them in a room and do the same thing.”

There were other stops along the way. Akan joined News Central, a Lagos-based broadcaster, to run the entertainment desk when it started in 2019. He helped develop programmes for the station, but he soon left because television work didn’t suit him. He preferred depth and long-form storytelling, while television’s demands pushed him toward shorter, faster formats. He knew the arrangement was unlikely to last because the format didn’t fit the way he wanted to work. He also worked at The Conversation Africa, a role that put him at the intersection of academia and the public.

By the time he launched his Afrobeats Intelligence podcast, all these acts had to end, and he had to focus squarely on the work. At some point, the project had to stop because of creative differences with his partners. Akan could not find a version of the project he believed in. “If I don’t believe in this, then why am I doing it?” Untangling himself from the relationship took a year and significant resources. But he left.

Right now, Akan says he feels fortunate to be working from a position where he has access to people, resources and funding, and where others are willing to believe in what he is building. That creates another responsibility: to make that trust worthwhile by getting better and building more carefully.

The Joey Akan Experience is part of that effort. It extends the same curiosity that shaped his music journalism into a broader media project, letting him explore people, ideas, and culture beyond music. “The Joey Akan experience, it’s my gift to the media space.” He argues that music has benefited from dedicated media projects such as Afrobeats Intelligence, while other parts of the culture have yet to receive the same depth of attention. “I use the word gift because music has enjoyed too much. Think about it. Do we have an equivalent of Afrobeats intelligence for Nollywood? No, we don’t.”

The uncertainty doesn’t bother him as much as it might have earlier in his career. But he trusts his judgement, his team, and the market enough to keep moving. On a personal level, he doesn’t know exactly what comes next. He knows only that he believes in it. For Joey Akan, that has usually been enough.

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“The first thing that I ever wanted to become was a novelist.”

Selly Thiam first imagined a career as a writer when an author visited her school in Chicago. She was eager to hear about the work and had plenty of questions. By the end of the visit, she knew it was what she wanted to do. Her teachers had already noticed her writing ability and encouraged it through programmes where she read, discussed literature and learnt how stories worked.

Her mother had a question of her own: how would this pay the bills? She was a schoolteacher who encouraged her daughters’ curiosity, took them to arts programmes, and suggested careers in medicine and law. Both went into the arts. Thiam remembers the suggestions as just that; her mother had given them considerable room to imagine other lives.

Making a living from that imagination would occupy Thiam for years. Today, it is the question behind AQ Studios, the company she is developing to invest in African creators and help them build businesses around their work.

Thiam grew up in a politically engaged household. Her Senegalese father and African American mother shared a pan-Africanist outlook and taught their children that Black people’s lives were connected across borders. When Nelson Mandela was released, her mother made Thiam and her younger sister sit through the television coverage. Even buying fruit involved a political choice: the family avoided grapes in solidarity with California farm workers.

Another consequence of this high political awareness was that Thiam also grew up surrounded by people from different parts of the world. Her father’s African community in Chicago included Nigerians, Haitians, Senegalese, and Ghanaians. Jackson Park, home to the University of Chicago, brought professors and families from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America into her orbit. For Thiam, Africa was part of family life long before she began writing stories about the continent.

Though her parents nudged her towards becoming a doctor, it was clear early on that Thiam had a gift for writing and telling stories. She began aspiring to be a writer when she attended a career talk in grade school where a writer spoke. “I was hooked. I had so many questions for her. I decided that this is what I was going to do.”

She began to pursue writing seriously, and it soon got her her first job teaching poetry classes for young children while she studied creative writing at university. Then she got a job in a Chicago public high school. The classroom demanded more than lessons. Some students were hungry; others had parents in prison. After Hurricane Katrina, children displaced from New Orleans arrived carrying experiences their classmates had not shared. Thiam used the arts to help them talk and tried to make the classroom a safe space. She loved the work, but eventually, she got exhausted.

Before she left, however, something outside school began pulling her toward another profession. One day, she stopped at a restaurant near her apartment and picked up the Windy City Times, a local queer newspaper. On its cover was a report about FannyAnn Eddy, a lesbian activist murdered in her office in Sierra Leone. Thiam was shaken not only by the crime but by the silence surrounding it. “There’s also just an absence of stories from this region. Where are the queer people? Where’s the story being documented? What is people’s lived experience? It woke up something in me where I realised I had no idea what was going on.” She wanted to change that.

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Thiam began by interviewing Africans in the diaspora. At a conference in New Orleans, she met a friend of Eddy’s and arranged to interview her in Toronto. A public radio producer lent her recording equipment and showed her how to use it. A fellow teacher lent her a car. That interview reached National Public Radio (NPR). It was Thiam’s first step into audio journalism. It was also the beginning of None on Record.

The name came from an earlier interview with a Nigerian priest seeking asylum in the United States. Thiam had asked whether there was a word for gay or lesbian people in his language. He told her he had “none on record”. The phrase stayed with her. For Thiam, None on Record became a response to the claim that queer people did not exist in Africa, or that queer histories on the continent had no past. “The first step in this is to create an oral history,” she says. “One thing people can’t say is that we didn’t exist because we exist.”

Around the same time, Thiam saw a job ad from StoryCorps in Brooklyn, New York. The organisers were preparing to launch an initiative to document the oral histories of African Americans across the United States and archive them in the Library of Congress. They needed a producer on the project. Thiam got the job and moved to New York.

When her contract at StoryCorps ended, she took a role at PBS, then went to graduate school at New York University for a master’s degree in journalism. While there, she became a Carnegie Fellow and an investigative journalism fellow for ABC News. For her graduate thesis, she made a documentary shot in the UK called Seeking Asylum, in which she followed African asylum seekers through the British asylum system.

After graduate school, Thiam briefly worked at The New York Times. She had the training and connections to keep building a career in New York. But the prospect was becoming less appealing. Thiam speaks warmly of her Times colleagues. Her frustration concerned the wider climate in America and journalism as racial justice protests gathered force. She recalls Black journalists being considered too personally invested to cover stories involving Black people, while white journalists’ objectivity went unquestioned. “I don’t want to lend my genius to this,” she remembers thinking. “I want to go build something and see what happens.”

She moved to Kenya to build None on Record. Activists there had already asked for help establishing an organisation around the work. She had to take responsibility for fundraising, staff, safety assessments and programmes. Keeping stories on record now required keeping an organisation running. In 2018, the team launched AfroQueer, bringing years of documentation into a documentary podcast. Thiam says it attracted hundreds of thousands of listens and earned awards. Invitations followed, and people began asking about the wider possibilities for African podcasting.

The team could use what it had learnt to support other storytellers. AQ Studios took its name from AfroQueer, retaining a connection to the work that had made it possible. One early project was adapting the blog Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women into a podcast. Production began during the pandemic. For a team accustomed to travelling to collect audio, it meant figuring out how to produce documentary storytelling remotely. But it also taught Thiam something more important: how to build value around intellectual property that wasn’t originally hers.

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The success with AfroQueer attracted interest from production companies looking to adapt the IP into films and television series. So Thiam met with Hollywood executives and filmmakers to discuss what the podcast could become. And naturally, she became curious and wanted to understand the mechanics. “How do I move IP along a value chain? How do I take an audio podcast and turn it into a film? Or how do I take an audio podcast and turn it into a book and then turn it into something else so that the IP can continue to grow and expand?”

She had moved back to the US during the pandemic. So she began meeting with writers and others in the entertainment industry. Then the writers’ strike happened, and for her, it was a blessing and a curse. Though that period stalled much of the work and deals that could have happened, it also gave her access to people who would normally have been too busy to speak with her. “It opened my eyes, really, to thinking about how IP functions as a valuable asset. And how you can take IP and turn it into so many different things.”

Eventually, she got the opportunity to put what she had learned during this period into practice. The Adventures podcast later morphed into a live show held twice in London, with guests like Yvonne Orji, Kelechi Okafor, and Mona Eltahawy. By 2022, however, Thiam felt ready to move beyond None on Record. By then, she had been on the project for over a decade.

At the same time, she could see the media business changing. Raising money had become harder, podcasting was evolving, and resources for creative projects were shrinking. But Thiam saw the problem slightly differently. “I was like, there’s money, but how do we get the money to the people who actually know how to make these really incredible things?” The problem wasn’t simply a shortage of ideas, but building an efficient value-exchange system around them. Creators needed help understanding how to monetise their work, identify audiences, approach streamers, use platforms such as YouTube, build sustainable businesses, and turn audiences into revenue.

This realisation drove Thiam to figure it out. So she, once again, decided she needed to go back to school. She went looking for an MBA for creatives and found the Creative Business Master’s programme at the National Film and Television School in London. By the end of her first year, she had a clearer idea of what AQ Studios needed to become: a venture studio.

This newfound focus became the new mission for a new iteration of her company. It would now invest in African creators regardless of where they were based, providing them with capital and, most importantly, production expertise, networks and business support. It would also take a stake in some of the intellectual property it helps develop, depending on the level of investment.

For Thiam, it represents another evolution in a career built around storytelling. She spent years documenting stories that she believed needed to exist. Now she is trying to build the businesses that allow those stories to survive, grow, and create value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She is also thinking about artificial intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“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.”