You know how suddenly everybody agrees that “the problem of the African creative industries is not talent, it’s infrastructure”? 🤦🏽♀️🤖
🍽 Well, the month of July served us a full mixed platter of INFRASTRUCTURE bitings, from Afreximbank’s finding a GP for its long-awaited film fund, Canal+ reviving Multichoice’s pay TV business, Nigeria launching its FreeTV platform, Google and Supercell investing in gaming studios, and Kenya hunting down pirates and shady broadcasters trying to cheat creatives out of their hard-earned cash.
That’s all in this new edition of HUSTLE & FLOW.
🥹I also talk about the nostalgic moment I had recently sharing some XYZ Show memories through posts that went totally viral (2 million views and counting).
⚽️ And about African football’s embarrassing servility towards FIFA, at a time where the institution’s management is more contested than ever.
That’s a lot - dig in below 👀 👇
FILM
🎬 Afreximbank’s long-awaited film fund finally has hands on the wheel.
Afrexim and its investment arm FEDA have named One Street Studios as co-General Partner of the Fund, which is targeting up to $1 billion for African film, TV and immersive media.
The fund itself isn’t a new announcement (it officially launched under CANEX back in May 2025) but this is the moment it goes from framework to functioning vehicle.
I had the honor to be in the room for this one (alongside PwC Nigeria), as part of the team that designed the Fund's original structure a few years ago, built on international film finance standards.
That it took so long to operationalize was not about the funding or the commitment on Afreximbank’s side, but came down to how challenging it proved to find enough bankable films to deploy it against, especially with distribution as tight as it's been.
🇺🇸 The choice of GP says a lot about Afrexim’s strategy. One Street Studios is run by Lavaille Lavette, a New York Times-bestselling publisher best known for her work with Viola Davis, with whom she co-founded JVL Media, alongside Davis's husband Julius Tennon.
That certainly makes for a valuable Rolodex, even if neither Lavette nor One Street Studios has a public track record in film finance or fund management, and Davis's own production credits (including The Woman King) run through a separate company she co-owns, JuVee Productions, not through JVL.
💫 What One Street Studios does bring, clearly, is proximity to the US diaspora and Black Hollywood capital markets, exactly the audience this Fund needs if the films it backs are going to travel and generate the returns to repay it (this is a debt fund, remember, the money has to come back).
That’s probably what caught Afreximbank's eye, which makes this partnership less of a bet on existing fund-management experience than one on access to the relationships and distribution muscle that make diaspora-facing films bankable in the first place.
The practical implication is that the films that get funded will skew toward diaspora and global audiences, not unlike what we've seen from Next Narrative Africa.
Some local filmmakers will be disappointed they're not the target market. But that's the point, not a flaw.
💪🏾 Moses Babatope's Nile Media Entertainment Group is teaming up with Idris Elba's 22Summers and UK genre studio Action Xtreme to build a slate of West African action films, with Elba directing one himself and executive-producing alongside longtime partner Gina Carter. The first title enters production Q4 2026, while a second will follow in Q1 2027.
Besides Elba’s big-name glamor, this partnership is exciting for its bet on the action genre, which travels better than almost anything else African cinema has tried to export.
The success of The Black Book proved a Nigerian action-thriller could break through on Netflix. South Africa's Heart of the Hunter went even further, becoming the first African film ever to top Netflix's Global Top 10, racking up 11 million views in its first two days and landing in the top 10 in 75 countries.
💡 But this deal is just one more step in a series of innovative and strategic moves by Nile to expand the scope of West African film.
Back in September 2025, Nile had already signed a first-look deal with Action Xtreme, which was soon followed by their first film Son of the Soil, a Lagos-set action-thriller directed by Action Xtreme's Chee Keong Cheung, which Nile released theatrically across Africa. That project also brought stunt training and action-choreography programs directly to Nigerian crews.
🌍 While it runs theatrical distribution for Universal and Paramount across the West African region, Nile is also known for pushing international distribution for Nigerian films, having taken Everybody Loves Jenifa through a 30-plus-country theatrical release across six continents and run UK/Ireland releases for Son of the Soil and Wives on Strike: The Uprising.
Babatope, as the co-founder and former MD of FilmOne, had already proven himself as a pillar of the Nigerian film industry. Through Nile, he keeps showing that he is one of the sharpest operators in West African film.
BROADCAST
📺 Canal+ posted its first positive results post-Multichoice acquisition, and so far, so good.
Group revenue for H1 2026 rose 40% year-on-year to €4.3 billion, with adjusted EBIT up 68% to €433 million, most of it driven by the scale achieved through the absorption of Multichoice.
MultiChoice itself contributed €143 million in adjusted EBIT. Also, after some controversial cost-cutting measures, €120 million of the group's €250 million full-year synergy target has already been banked.
Canal+ Africa CEO David Mignot attributed these good results to renewed sports rights, expanded local content, and a renewed drive to push the traditional linear business that Multichoice has neglected in favor of Showmax.
📈 This proved successful: new subscriber acquisition across MultiChoice markets was up 40% year-on-year, and June 2026 was South Africa's best month for new subscriber intake in a decade.
Canal+ got there the unglamorous way: cutting decoder and equipment prices to lower the barrier to entry, and expanding points of sale by more than 15% since March.
Basically, Canal+ is cleaning up and moving away from the subscription-streaming dream and back to pay TV basics: decoders, sales agents, and channel packages.
This proves that there is still a big, underpriced opportunity in linear broadcasting, free and paid, across Africa. As often, the truth is not sexy: the shift to digital will take years longer here than the industry likes to pretend, and TV will keep reaching more households than any streaming app for a good while yet.
It's also worth remembering that in developed markets, local film industries were built on the back of strong broadcasters acting as commissioners and trainers. That’s a role most African broadcasters (outside of South Africa) have never been resourced to play.
This is a sector primed for disruption, in the best sense, in markets where governments understand the role a healthy broadcaster plays in the wider film and content value chain -- more on this below.
But first, to finish on Canal+, another news:
📽 The operator has commissioned 10 made-for-television films from Flying Whale, a new production label under Editi Effiong's Anakle Films.
Effiong was approached by Canal+'s programming director for ROK and Nollywood channels, Cédric Pierre-Louis, after the success of The Black Book, to produce a slate of films on TV budgets. Four of the ten commissioned films are already completed and delivered.
We’ve seen this kind of broadcaster slate deal before: Kunle Afolayan famously had (still has?) one with Netflix and Inkblot one with Amazon.
👐 It’s a sensible model for both parties: by offering a meaningful commitment (slate of 10 films), Canal+ gets to work with one of the continent’s best production companies at an affordable cost. For Anakle, it brings revenue stability to the business through a long term deal with a loyal partner.
Now back to my point about the broadcast opportunity.
📡 In June, Nigeria launched FreeTV, a national digital television platform offering more than 100 channels with zero subscription fees, targeting at least 40 million households via satellite and terrestrial broadcast, plus a mobile app for those without either.
Content will span news, sports, movies, education, and dedicated Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo-language channels, reaching rural households that pay-TV and broadband have never covered.
The government is pitching it as unlocking Nigeria's ₦605.2 billion (roughly $442 million) advertising market and creating new revenue for broadcasters, technicians and local creatives, with regional production studios planned in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano and Benin.
If it works, this could be transformative -- and that’s a clear example of the opportunity I was talking about earlier.
😖 Of course, that "if" is doing real work. FreeTV is basically a rebrand for Nigeria's Digital Switch-Over project. First conceived back in 2006 (20 years ago!!), it’s been plagued by a string of missed deadlines: 2012, 2015, 2017, 2022 all came and went. On the way, an estimated ₦60 billion (roughly $44 million) was spent with nothing to show for it.
Since then, YouTube and TikTok have also come to disrupt the attention market and transform the audience’s behaviors and expectations.
So, the launch announcement was the easy part. Sustained rollout, reliable electricity, and genuine advertiser uptake are where every previous attempt has stalled. Still, this Ministry is trying oo, so we remain hopeful that fifth time’s the charm.
GAMING
🎮 There’s been some exciting movement in the gaming space last month, and the best breakdown comes from Savannah Creatives’ Maurice Chapot, which is worth reading in full.
Here's the gist for the lazy ones:
💵 First, Google Play's new Indie Games Fund for Africa announced it would put $1 million in equity-free funding behind ten independent studios across Sub-Saharan Africa through individual grants ranging between $50,000 to $200,000, plus mentorship from Google Play's team.
Applications are closed now, so we can only wait for the results. Knowing Google’s high standards, the winners are likely to provide a good map of Africa’s most innovative and savvy studios.
As Maurice said, this won't fix the industry's real distribution, discovery and monetization problems, but it's a meaningful answer to the issue of limited development funding. And who knows, if Google spots a hit, they certainly have the power to push distribution and marketing too.
💵 To add to this, Supercell also opened its own Developer Grants Program for African studios in the same month, aiming to provide $20,000-$200,000 grants to 3 to 5 studios for its first cohort.
Two global gaming companies moving in the same direction in the same month is a strong signal.
According to SpielFabrique & Xsolla's State of the African Video Game Industry 2026 report, the continent's gaming market hit $2.29 billion in 2025 revenue, growing at 12% a year, roughly six times the global rate. There are now some 349 million gamers across Africa, 90% of them on mobile.
These numbers get repeated endlessly. Yet, the real story is that Africa has 7% of the world's gamers and captures less than 0.5% of global gaming revenue.
💸 The demand is real and growing fast, but the money it generates flows almost entirely to foreign studios and platforms, not to the people making games on the continent.
Even a few percentage points redirected toward African-made titles would be transformative for studios that currently survive on corporate commissions and freelance work rather than their own IP.
Of course, always remember that companies like Google and Supercell are not launching this kind of initiative out of the goodness of their hearts to “support Africa’, eh? They are investing (very cheaply) in their own future markets. Take what you need from them and move on.
SPORTS BUSINESS
⚽ Africa's ten representatives collectively earned more than $154 million in prize money from the 2026 World Cup. That’s the largest haul the continent has ever taken home, and proof of just how tightly African football's finances are tethered to a single institution.
Morocco topped the list at $31.5 million after their quarter-final run. Egypt banked $17.5 million for reaching the Round of 16. Seven countries (Senegal, Algeria, DR Congo, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, South Africa and Ghana) each collected $13.5 million after Round of 32 exits. Tunisia, the only African side eliminated in the group stage, still took home $10.5 million.
To put that in perspective, FIFA's own regular Forward development program currently gives a federation like Ghana's roughly $8 million per four-year cycle to fund youth football, infrastructure and coaching. Ghana's group-stage prize money alone, from three matches, is worth nearly seven years of that entire program.
😱 This all matters more than usual right now, because FIFA has just been through one of its most politically volatile weeks in years, and Africa did not exactly distinguish itself.
In late July, FIFA president Gianni Infantino unveiled a plan to sell roughly a 20% stake in a new commercial entity that would run the World Cup and Club World Cup, valuing it at $20 billion and aiming to raise $4.2 billion from private investors, reportedly including the Kushner family.
The backlash was immediate and severe: UEFA (European federation), CONCACAF (Americas) and the AFC (Asia), as well as close Infantino collaborators all publicly rejected the plan. Within days, Infantino scrapped it entirely.
😒 Meanwhile… Africa was silent. Finally, CAF president Patrice Motsepe defended Infantino, praising his "support for Africa.”
If you want the longer history of how Africa's votes have shaped FIFA politics, Netflix's FIFA Uncovered is fascinating: a four-part 2022 documentary tracing FIFA's corruption scandals through the Blatter and Infantino eras, including how Blatter courted African federations for decades with promises of development money that, all too often, never reached the pitch.
When nearly every other major football institution turns against a FIFA president, Africa remains his most reliable bloc, as a function of its dependence. And that’s embarrassing 🤦🏽♀️
Like for any other sector, the balance of power needs to shift for the sake of Africa’s sovereignty.
One underused lever is money that African clubs and academies are already owed and simply aren't claiming.
FIFA's training compensation and solidarity mechanism requires clubs abroad to pay a share of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player between ages 12 and 21.
🏃🏾 A 2021 FIFA report found that of roughly $80 million in solidarity contributions distributed globally in 2020, less than 1% reached African academies because most of them never register players properly, don't track them once they leave, or lack the legal capacity to file a claim with FIFA's Dispute Resolution Chamber. That's real money sitting on the table today, recoverable through better administration.
CAF has already shown it can build its own commercial engine, with its own club competition revenue nearly two-and-a-half times higher than five years ago. The more that muscle grows, the less any single World Cup prize check, or any single president's goodwill, will matter.
POLICY
🏴☠️ Kenya has put a number on one of the industry's oldest, vaguest complaints: it actually calculated the cost of piracy.
Turns out that digital piracy costs the country an estimated $712 million (KES 92 billion), every year, and drains roughly $131.5 million in tax revenue on top of that.
Just imagine if that money reached creatives instead.
Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo Gitau said the drain hits musicians, filmmakers, authors, journalists, software developers and sports broadcasters alike, and that stronger enforcement could create or sustain more than 50,000 jobs across the creative and tech sectors.
🏹 Kenya seems committed to going on a hunt for these missing millions. It announced an upcoming national awareness campaign, a new National Policy on Digital Piracy, and alignment with the Copyright and Related Rights Bill currently under public consultation. This builds on an actual crackdown already underway, with 84 piracy sites targeted back in May.
Piracy has been the industry's most talked-about, least-quantified problem for years. This is progress.
⚖️ Kenya showed up for its creative class for second time in July, this time with a landmark High Court ruling.
AL Is On Production spent eleven years fighting Nation Media Group (NMG) for money it was owed, and this month, it finally won.
📺 Under a 2011 agreement, AIOP produced 295 episodes of Mali, Kenya's first locally branded soap opera, for broadcast on NTV Kenya, NTV Uganda and the now-defunct QTV. NMG held exclusive control over selling and airing the ads around the show and was supposed to account for that revenue back to the producer so they could split it.
But, at some point, AIOP smelled a rat. It suspected it wasn't getting its full share, and rather than let it go, took the dispute to arbitration in 2015.
That turned into a years-long fight just to see the numbers. The arbitrator had to issue repeated orders directing NMG to hand over reconciliation logs and invoices. AIOP pushed for an independent audit of every ad spot aired alongside Mali between 2011 and 2016, and got one.
When the arbitrator finally ruled in March 2025, the verdict was unambiguous: NMG had breached the agreement by withholding complete revenue records despite repeated demands.
NMG then tried a different route, asking Kenya's High Court to throw the award out entirely. AIOP fought that too, and won again. In July, the High Court confirmed that NMG should pay AIOP KSh320 million (roughly $2.5 million), made up of KSh160.55 million in unpaid revenue, 12% interest going back to 2019, and the arbitration and legal costs NMG's resistance racked up along the way 🤯 💰
Kudos to AIOP for staying the course. Most producers don't have the appetite, or the cash reserves, to fight a listed media group through arbitration and then through the courts for over a decade.
Thanks to AIOP, every Kenyan producer negotiating an ad-revenue-share deal with a broadcaster will now be able to point to this precedent.
This also makes the Kenyan creative industries more investable: as HEVA’s Wakiuru Njuguna wrote, bankability isn't only about content, talent or audience size, it's also about whether the institutions underpinning the industry can be trusted to enforce contracts.
I certainly wish this had been possible 17 years ago when I was producing The XYZ Show…
STORYTIME
Which leads me to the nostalgia moment I experienced on the interwebs after my recent series of posts on why The XYZ Show never made money.
🥹 The posts generated 2 million views across platforms, with hundreds of Kenyan fans telling me how the show defined their childhood, taught them about what was going on in their country, and asking me to bring it back - even offering to pay for it (tempting but no).
My posts actually stemmed from a conversation with Communique’s David Adeleke. We were talking about how hard it is to monetize creative content on this continent, even when the audience is there. I realized I had a perfect example of that with The XYZ Show.
For readers outside Kenya: in 2009, I co-founded Buni Media in Nairobi with cartoonist Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) and launched The XYZ Show, a satirical puppet news program.
We built it in the aftermath of the 2008 post-election violence, on the belief that if Kenyans had an outlet to process their frustration with humor, maybe more violence could be avoided.
🚀 It ran for 14 seasons on national TV, spread to radio, DVDs and online, spawned a Nigerian adaptation (Ogas at the Top), and reached more than 10 million people.
It was also, from a business standpoint, doomed from the start.
The XYZ Show was directly inspired by Les Guignols de l'Info, Canal+'s legendary puppet satire, which ran in France for 30 years. Their numbers are documented, so I did the math.
Les Guignols operated on roughly €15 million per season, about €9,400 per minute, fully funded by Canal+, which considered it profitable both financially and as a subscriber-acquisition tool.
Our show cost $1,000 per minute, dirt cheap by comparison but wildly expensive by Kenyan standards. Our broadcaster licensed it for $3,000 an episode, covering just 20% of production costs. The other 80% came from donors we had to re-convince every single season, for 14 seasons straight.
The personal math is starker. Bruno Gaccio, Les Guignols' head writer, disclosed in 2003 that he earned €41,000 a month in salary and royalties, likely more later, adding up to an estimated €5-7 million over 15 years.
I paid myself $4,000 a month as co-founder, CEO and co-creator of Kenya's equivalent hit. Over six years running the show, that's roughly $288,000, unevenly, although some months I paid myself nothing so I could pay the team. Had I had the same success in France as I had in Kenya, I’d be a millionnaire. Instead, I just survived.
🤔 So why did such a popular show never make money? For several deep, structural reasons.
First, our costs of production didn't match our market. The show was technically complex to make and required a large team, which made it very expensive by local standards at a time when broadcasters were only starting to pay for local content.
Piracy was rampant, though honestly, even with perfect enforcement, the economics would have looked the same.
We had large followings on Facebook and YouTube, but platform monetization was not enabled at the time.
Because the show was news-based, last week's episode was worthless the following week, so unlike other producers, we had no back catalog to eventually monetize.
⚠️ And because we were openly critical of the government, brands and telcos wouldn't touch us. Officially.
That’s where the story connects to the Mali ruling. There was, in fact, plenty of advertising running around and inside our show. A LOT of it, in fact.
But our broadcasters (we had several over the years) always told us those slots had been bought in bulk, for the year, by brands, and therefore weren't tied specifically to XYZ, which meant we could never negotiate a revenue share.
🧐 We suspected that this was an easy excuse for the channels to avoid splitting revenue with us. We just had no way to challenge it, and no legal tool that would have forced the broadcasters to open their books the way Kenya's courts just forced Nation Media to do for Mali's producers.
Seventeen years later, that tool finally exists.
In the end, none of this matters. The team and I never made this show for the money. It had a huge impact on Kenyan society, and we had an enormous amount of fun making it. It remains one of my proudest achievements 🙏
It also taught me a lot about how to ACTUALLY make money in the creative industries. I put everything I learned in my book, Creative Cash Flow, so you don't have to make the same mistakes I made.
📖 On that topic, I’ve received tons of requests for print copies, and I’m working on having the book stocked in bookstores in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned for more details.