There was a time when an African young man who wanted to make money needed a shop, a farm, a factory, a truck, a warehouse—or, at the very least, something tangible enough to convince his neighbours that he was not simply waiting for a miracle.
Not anymore.
Today, all you need is a smartphone, a ring light, an internet connection, a sufficiently elastic conscience and an unshakable belief that strangers on the other side of the world are desperately waiting to watch you dance, prank your grandmother, quarrel with your girlfriend or explain how you became successful.
Welcome to Africa’s new gold rush: content creation.
It is advertised as the perfect 21st-century business model. Or, at least, a side hustle that probably earns you more money than your 9 to 5 job; and you don’t have to answer to any boss. No warehouse. No machinery. No inventory. No customs officers. No landlord breathing down your neck. Just create “content,” attract eyeballs and watch the dollars roll in.
At least, that is the theory.
Africa, which has never been particularly good at resisting a shiny new opportunity, has responded enthusiastically. A vast army of unemployed and underemployed young people has enlisted. Some are genuinely talented. Some are hilarious. Some are creative. Some are simply persistent. And some appear to have discovered that the difference between a career and a camera pointed at your face is mostly good lighting.
The battlefield is the internet.
The ammunition is content.
The prize is the eyeball.
And the generals are sitting somewhere in California.
The New Digital Plantation?
There is something both exhilarating and unsettling about this new economy.
Millions of Africans are producing content for global platforms. They make skits, music, films, podcasts, comedy, commentary, tutorials, dance videos, beauty videos, motivational speeches and videos of themselves eating things that previous generations would have eaten without filming. They even film nudity and intimacy.
They supply the creativity.
The platforms supply the infrastructure.
And somewhere between the two, the algorithm decides whether anybody gets paid and how much.
This is the remarkable part. We have entered another economic age in which the person producing the commodity does not necessarily own the marketplace, the distribution network, the customer relationship or even the rules governing how much the commodity is worth.
It sounds familiar.
And that should worry us.
For generations, Africa has been remarkably efficient at supplying the world with raw materials while somebody else supplied the machinery for turning those materials into wealth.
We exported cocoa and imported chocolate.
We exported crude oil and imported refined petroleum products.
We exported cotton and imported finished textiles.
We exported minerals and imported electronics, cars and other manufactured goods.
Now we export attention, creativity and culture and allow somebody else to own the machines through which the world consumes them.
Apparently, history has changed its clothes but kept the same tailor.
From Commodity Boards to Algorithms
Our grandparents knew the old arrangement.
The colonial economy was organised around extracting African raw materials for external markets. Commodity boards, in collaboration with European agents and governments, helped determine what farmers received. Trading networks determined access to markets. European manufacturers added value. Consumers elsewhere, including Africa, paid considerably more for the finished product.
Africa went home with peanuts. Europe took home the peanut farm.
Independence changed the flags.
It did not significantly change the economic architecture.
Today, the commodity is different.
It may be a song rather than cocoa.
A skit rather than groundnuts.
A film rather than palm oil.
A viral dance rather than rubber.
A podcast rather than tin.
But the broad pattern can look remarkably familiar: Africa supplies the raw material; somebody else owns much of the machinery that converts attention into money.
Only this time, the machinery is digital.
And the plantation has an algorithm.
The most amusing—and perhaps most revealing—part is that we voluntarily line up to work on it.
Nobody needs to send a colonial administrator to Lagos to recruit content creators. We recruit ourselves.
We wake up, charge our phones, check the algorithm, create content, check the algorithm again, create another piece of content, check the algorithm, discover that the algorithm has changed, panic, attend a masterclass on “How to Beat the Algorithm,” and then create more content.
It is industrial production disguised as entertainment.
“Everybody Is Making Millions”
There is another fascinating feature of this new gold rush: almost everybody appears to be making money.
At least on social media.
Every few days, somebody announces how much he or she has earned from content creation. The figures are impressive enough to make a university degree look like an elaborate prank.
“Here is how I made $10,000 in one month.”
“Here is how I made $50,000 from my phone.”
“Five secrets that made me financially free.”
“From unemployment to six figures.”
Naturally, there is always a course.
Because the fastest way to become rich is apparently to teach people how to make money from content creation—not exactly from content creation.
The content creator becomes the content about content creation.
And the aspiring millionaire becomes the product.
This creates a delicious paradox. If everybody is making millions from the platforms, why are so many people still buying courses on how to make millions from the platforms?
Perhaps the greatest monetised content of all is the promise of monetisation.
But behind the comedy lies a serious issue.
The global platforms establish the rules. They determine eligibility, visibility, monetisation conditions, advertising arrangements and, ultimately, the economics of attention. They can change an algorithm overnight and turn yesterday’s superstar into today’s digital furniture.
The creator may have 500,000 followers.
The platform has billions.
The creator may own the content.
The platform owns the road to the audience.
And in the digital economy, controlling the road is the most profitable side of the business.
The Eyeball Economy
The new currency is not oil.
It is not gold.
It is not even money.
It is attention.
Everyone is scrolling.
Everyone is scrambling for it.
News organisations want it. Politicians want it. churches want it. Influencers want it. Brands want it. Activists want it. Comedians want it. Your neighbour who has just discovered motivational speaking wants it.
Everybody wants your eyeballs.
The internet has therefore created a strange economic system in which a person can become famous without necessarily becoming wealthy, influential without necessarily becoming powerful, and busy without necessarily becoming productive.
We have created an entire generation competing for attention while relatively few people own the infrastructure that harvests it.
That distinction matters.
A farmer may own his harvest but not control the international commodity market.
A musician may own his song but not control the global streaming ecosystem.
A filmmaker may produce a brilliant movie but not control its distribution.
A content creator may produce millions of views but not control the platform that delivers them.
The common denominator is ownership—and control.
Ownership and control remain stubbornly unfashionable in Africa.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
The same story is unfolding in African music and film.
Our musicians produce globally influential sounds. Our filmmakers tell stories that attract international audiences. Our actors and comedians have become cultural exports. Afrobeats and African cinema have demonstrated that the continent possesses extraordinary creative capital.
But once again, we are tempted to celebrate the export while ignoring the infrastructure.
We celebrate the artist.
Who owns the distribution?
We celebrate the song.
Who controls the platform?
We celebrate the audience.
Who owns the data?
We celebrate the billions of views.
Who determines their economic value?
This is not an argument against the platforms. Far from it.
The platforms have created extraordinary opportunities. They have democratised access to audiences that African creators could scarcely have reached a generation ago.
But opportunity is not the same thing as ownership.
And visibility is not the same thing as wealth.
Africa has repeatedly confused the two.
The Minerals Are Underground. The Platforms Are Above Ground.
The uncomfortable truth is that this is not merely a content-creation problem.
It is an African economic habit.
We have been trained—by history, by circumstance and sometimes by our own choices—to think of economic opportunity primarily as the chance to supply into somebody else’s system.
If the world wants minerals, we dig.
If it wants crude oil, we pump.
If it wants cocoa, we grow.
If it wants music, we sing.
If it wants entertainment, we perform.
If it wants content, we create.
The missing question is always the same:
Who owns the system that turns all this activity into wealth?
Who determines what to pay and when to change the game?
That is the question Africa must finally confront.
Because the new global economy is not going to be built merely on what we produce.
It will be built on who owns the platforms, intellectual property, distribution networks, data, financial systems and technologies through which production becomes wealth.
The West is not wicked for understanding this.
Indeed, it would be strange to expect it not to.
Europe and North America have historically been very good at identifying where value is created and then building institutions around owning, financing, distributing and scaling that value.
Africa’s problem is not that somebody else is doing it.
Our problem is that we keep arriving at the party with only the raw materials and leaving somebody else with the factory.
In the past hundred years, the USA, Japan and China have proven just how faulty Africa’s business model is. We must own, co-own and host the factories and logistic systems to be in the winning team. Everyone else is collateral damage.
The Real Content We Need
Perhaps the most important content Africa needs to create is not another skit.
It is an ownership strategy.
We need African platforms that can compete globally.
African-owned streaming services with global ambitions.
African technology companies that build infrastructure rather than merely use it.
African payment systems that capture value from African and global commerce.
African intellectual-property companies that protect and monetise African creativity.
African venture capital capable of financing African technology at scale.
African universities producing not just graduates who can operate foreign platforms but entrepreneurs capable of inventing new ones.
And, above all, governments and private capital willing to invest patiently in the infrastructure of the knowledge economy.
We should not discourage the young man with a smartphone from making skits.
Let him make the skits.
Let him “become rich.”
Let him entertain us.
Let him conquer the algorithm.
But let us also ask a more ambitious question:
Why must the African always be the content creator and never the platform owner?
Why must we forever be the talent, the labour, the consumer and the market while someone else owns the machine?
That is the real danger of Africa’s new digital gold rush.
We may be about to repeat the oldest African economic mistake with the newest African technology.
The slaves were the commodity.
Then came agricultural commodities.
Then minerals.
Now come culture, creativity and attention.
Different century. Different commodity. Different vocabulary.
Same underlying economics.
The West does not need to conspire against Africa. It merely needs to remain better organised.
Africa does not need another conspiracy theory.
It needs a memory.
Because history has already shown us what happens when you own the resource but somebody else owns the road to the market.
The answer is not to stop creating.
It is to create, own and co-own.
Otherwise, Africa’s new army of content creators may discover an old African fate:
We supplied the raw material.
Somebody else built the factory.
And somebody else became a billionaire from operating it.
We went home with peanuts.
Someone else owns the peanut farm.
Only this time, the algorithm is the marketing board.
*Victor Anazonwu, a historian, journalist and author, is a lecturer in African Economic History at the International Center for Regional Integration and Trade Research (ICRITR), Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.
