Victor Anazonwu has written a genuinely useful essay. His central claim — that Africa keeps supplying valuable raw material to systems it does not own, and that content creation is merely the latest chapter in that story — deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as another round of digital-age pessimism. But the metaphor he reaches for, and the diagnosis it produces, is not quite right in my view. And in an argument about who owns the machinery of value, precision matters.
Start with the plantation itself. A plantation economy was built on coercion: people did not choose to be there, could not leave, and owned nothing of what they produced, including in many cases their own bodies. A content creator in Lagos or Nairobi chooses to open the app. She can stop tomorrow. She retains legal ownership of what she posts, can move it to a competing platform, can license it directly to a brand, and can, in a growing number of cases, build an income stream that a plantation worker could never have imagined. To call this a plantation is to borrow the moral weight of slavery for a grievance that, however real, is of a different order entirely.
It also, ironically, does the very thing Anazonwu warns against: it exports Africa’s most serious historical experience as a rhetorical commodity for a very good line.
The more useful comparison, and one much closer to what he is actually describing, is the colonial commodity economy he invokes later — cocoa, crude oil, cotton. That comparison is apt, and it is also more damning, because it does not require coercion to work.
Farmers who grew cocoa were not enslaved; they were simply operating inside a price and export system they did not design and could not renegotiate. That is exactly the position of the African content creator today: a free agent operating inside rules, algorithms and revenue splits designed elsewhere, with no seat at the table where those rules are written.
The essay already has the right analogy sitting one paragraph away from the one it chose for its headline.
The bigger problem, though, is that the piece diagnoses a psychology where the real story is a set of structural constraints. Anazonwu suggests that Africa has been “trained” to think of opportunity as supplying into someone else’s system, and that the fix is essentially attitudinal — build platforms, own the infrastructure, stop settling for the raw material. This is true as far as it goes, but it skips the actual reason Nigeria does not have its own YouTube.
It is not that nobody has thought of it. It is that building a platform at global scale requires patient capital at a depth that Nigerian and African capital markets do not currently provide; a regulatory environment that is still fragmented across 54 jurisdictions with 54 different rules on data, payments and cross-border commerce; intellectual property enforcement mechanisms that remain weak; and currency and capital-control regimes that make it difficult to raise, hold and deploy the kind of dollar-denominated capital that platform-building requires.
The African Continental Free Trade Area’s digital trade protocol is precisely the instrument designed to begin addressing the regulatory fragmentation piece of this — and it is telling that an essay about who owns the system does not mention it once.
It is also worth noting, in fairness to the continent, that the essay understates what has already been built. Flutterwave and Paystack are African-owned infrastructure sitting underneath a meaningful share of African digital commerce. Boomplay has built real African-owned distribution in music streaming.
These are not proof that the ownership gap Anazonwu describes is closed — it plainly is not — but they are evidence that the constraint is not a failure of imagination or ambition.
Nigerians have tried to build the factory. The harder question, and the one worth an essay of its own, is why so many of those efforts get acquired, out-capitalised, or squeezed by regulatory friction before they reach the scale that would let them compete with the platforms Anazonwu is describing.
None of this means the essay’s warning is wrong. It is right, and it is worth repeating: visibility is not wealth, and a following is not an asset until someone other than the platform can be made to pay for it. But the policy response that follows from a structural diagnosis looks different from the one that follows from a psychological one.
It is not primarily a call to the young man with the ring light to think bigger. It is a call to policymakers to deepen domestic capital markets, harmonise digital trade rules across the continent, strengthen IP enforcement, and treat the platform economy as a trade and industrial policy question rather than a cultural one.
Africa’s content creators are not the problem to be solved. They are, in fact, the closest thing the continent currently has to genuine comparative advantage in the attention economy. The question is not why they got in the boat. It is why nobody has yet built them a harbour they can call their own.
**Emeka E. Ibe is a public sector consultant and PhD candidate in Policy and Strategic Studies at the African University of Science and Technology, Abuja.
