Offscript with Anita Eboigbe
Big Cabal Media’s COO on building out editorial operations across government-backed, grant-funded and VC-funded media ventures.
Hello everyone, quick update! 🎉 We’ve made a small shift to our publishing schedule. Offscript will now be published on Wednesdays instead of Sundays. From now on, you can look forward to a brand-new edition dropping every Wednesday at 12 PM.
“I enjoy talking things through, breaking things down, and figuring stuff out. I do it for fun—if it works, great; if it doesn’t, that’s fine too.”
Over a Google Meet call, Anita Eboigbe is telling me about her approach to work and life. It’s the same mindset that helped her become the managing editor of her university’s newspaper in her first year. That was her first time running a newsroom, but it wouldn’t be the last. Throughout her career, she has led editorial teams across government-backed, grant-funded, and private-equity-backed media ventures.
Today, she’s the Chief Operating Officer of Big Cabal Media (BCM), one of Africa’s most prominent digital media companies. She joined BCM as the Editor-in-Chief of Citizen, the company’s political and civic engagement publication, before shifting into operations as its first Chief of Staff. From there, she rose to COO.
Her journey shows adaptability and the ability to build structure around creative ideas, skills she began to develop as a young girl, the first of five siblings growing up in Benin City. Her lawyer father helped create an environment where curiosity and imagination could thrive.
“He was very intentional about taste,” Eboigbe recalls. “You were going to know what the world is doing. You were going to know how the world was thinking. You were going to travel, and you were going to meet people.”
That intention showed up in the smallest routines. He made her and her siblings read and discuss the dictionary, the Bible, and other literary texts multiple times, ensuring language and thought became second nature. As a way of bonding, she would sit with him after work and review his legal cases. At just eight years old, she began clerking at his law firm and would do so until she was 19.
Her love for books and the environment in which she grew up—“I was surrounded by very rich, complex, textured, and interesting people”—nurtured a love for storytelling as a tool for expressing herself. But at first, it was only a hobby. In real life, Eboigbe wanted to be a doctor.
That plan shifted just as she was about to get into university. She realized she didn't want to commit to seven years of medical school. She had to choose a course that would take a shorter time to complete.
Law seemed like the natural option, so she applied to study it at Ambrose Alli University, while choosing Mass Communication everywhere else she applied. Fate, however, intervened. A strike delayed admissions at Ambrose Alli, and by the time the university was ready to take students, Anita had already begun studying Mass Communication at another university.
Two months after resuming at university, Eboigbe became the managing editor of the school newspaper. She would later become editor-in-chief of the paper, head of research for the university debate team, vice president of the Mass Communication Students Association, and eventually president—and then head of the university students’ council. However, her political and social activities on campus did not affect her academics. She finished with a first-class degree and was the valedictorian of her year.
“People say nerds are very quiet people, they lack social skills, they don’t know how to talk. But that’s not me,” she says with a laugh. “I’m only a nerd by the definition that if you like to read, then you’re a nerd. In reality, I grew up with five siblings. I went to a public secondary school. I grew up in a household where my dad did a lot of political and legal things. There was no world where I would have lacked the social skills to do a lot of the things I did, and I am still doing.”
Upon graduating from university, she had the option to pursue a master’s degree immediately. But she was exhausted with formal education and wanted to gain some work experience first. So, she opted to serve out her National Youth Service Corps year.
On arriving at the NYSC camp, Eboigbe noticed most of her friends already had a clear plan for where they wanted to work during the service year, but she didn’t. Instead of chasing big companies, she chose the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). It wasn’t the most prestigious place to start, but she was convinced she could make something of it.
“I had a strong belief in the fact that wherever it was that I was going, I was the constant. Because I’m an excellent person, then that place would be good and excellent for me.” Initially, NAN rejected her as there were no vacancies. But when she kept on returning to the agency, her persistence paid off, and she was given a role as a roving reporter.
Around this time, Eboigbe’s work had begun to crystallise around a central idea: to increase the surface area of quality information for everyone. This was the approach she took to her work at NAN. She helped set up the data desk for the agency, helping tell more data-driven stories, and she also started the box office desk at NAN.
“There wasn’t a lot of interest in the Nigerian box office as a thing that you cover beyond ‘this movie has come out.’ And my whole thing was, why don’t we figure out what’s going on in the industry as a whole, and spotlight that? So I pioneered how the industry is reported now from a business perspective.”
Six months after she joined NAN, Eboigbe moved from roving reporter to junior reporter and would eventually rise to assistant editor during her three-year stint at the agency.
She left NAN to join HumAngle, a fledgling media outfit focused on conflict reporting, as its first head of data. Beyond her editorial duties, she also stepped into operations, putting lessons from her MBA program into practice. One of her major contributions was helping launch HumAngle+, a subscription product that offered members in-depth reporting, exclusive newsletters, and research-driven insights on insecurity and human rights issues, a rare experiment in reader-funded journalism in Nigeria. While working at HumAngle, she also co-founded In Nolly, a Substack publication covering the Nigerian Film industry.
Around this time, Tomiwa Aladekomo, CEO of Big Cabal Media, had begun to headhunt her to lead the company’s new politics and civic engagement publication, Citizen. Not long after HumAngle+ launched, she accepted the offer and joined BCM as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Citizen, helping set up the initial editorial team.
Earlier in the year, BCM had raised a seed round and was expanding into new products and events. As Citizen took off, it became clear that Eboigbe’s skills stretched far beyond the newsroom. BCM’s leadership recognised that she was better suited to streamline operations at a company-wide level. She soon transitioned into the role of the company’s first operations lead.
“If the entire engine is not working properly, my corner, where I’m managing my small publication, will also suffer. So the question was: how do I get the whole engine to work optimally so everyone thrives?” She rose through the ranks from operations lead to Chief of Staff and then COO, helping to streamline BCM’s operations as the company grew in size and ambition.
Anita Eboigbe’s career has been defined by a willingness to fly headfirst into chaotic situations and bring some semblance of order. Typically, it takes her about three years to steady the ship before moving on to the next challenge. But at BCM, three years in, she isn’t looking for an exit.
For her, the difference lies in the scale of the work. “Because of the quality of the business, the quality of dreamers we have on the team, and because media problems don’t finish,” she says, “I don’t know that there will never not be challenges. But we will keep evolving to meet them.”