Opinion

Media and Nigeria’s soft power conundrum By Rafiu Ajakaye

Published

2 years ago

November 30, 2023

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I thank you for the honour of asking me to keynote this event. I also thank you for the rare privilege of asking me to speak to any issue of my choice as long as it touches on this noble profession. I have chosen to share with you my thoughts on ‘the media and the Nigerian soft power conundrum’. The title looks a bit complicated. But I’m in the midst of very experienced media professionals and so there is no point in me defining what the media is — including the fact that the term has taken on wider meanings within the context of the internet age. My use of the ‘media’ shall, in this discussion, include all shades of meanings that the media has assumed in the 21st century. In other words, the media will refer to the conventional print, broadcast or multimedia platforms, as it does to all variants of the new media that were birthed by the internet: Facebook, X (Twitter), instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, TikTok, and all others.

All of these platforms serve to send messages to wider audiences in nanoseconds. In the process, media stakeholders determine what people read or see, shape opinions, and influence how people perceive or relate with any particular phenomenon. In all of these, the media can determine the fate of individuals, brands, nations, and the world.

Throughout history, different civilisations have developed the art of using the media to shape how they are seen by outsiders through strategic image laundering. This is in the realisation of the global race for scarce resources. From the East to the West, countries have also been intentional in determining what is available to their populations through the media. Most of the sleek videos we see about cutting-edge technology in China or elsewhere are excellent image laundering projects, perfected to constantly give certain impression of their society, thereby attracting capital investments, talents, and quality traffic to their tourist centres. Similar efforts are made to reduce to the barest minimum, or gloss over, what outsiders see of the imperfections of their society.

Today, how we see nations or brands have deftly determined our relationships with or perceptions of them. Such perceptions dictate many decisions we make everyday. Some countries have succeeded in projecting themselves as tourist havens, tax haven, bastion of democracy and human rights, destination for world-class education, friendliest business place, humanitarian support, the hub of technology, entertainment, beautiful culture and arts, best place for talent grooming, military prowess, or invincible security network. This outlook, or how we perceive them, has helped them to shape global opinion around them and anything concerning them. With it they get things done. Because of it, we are persuaded to act in a particular way towards them without any military force or threat. This, ladies and gentlemen, is called soft power.

The term soft power was coined in the 1980s by political scientist Joseph Nye Jr., who defined it as the ability of a country to ‘influence others without resorting to coercive pressure’. The Foreign Policy , a publication based in the United States, says soft ‘power usually originates outside government in places like schools, religious institutions, and charitable groups. It is also formed through music, sports, media, and major industries like Silicon Valley and Hollywood’.

Soft power could well be the alternative to brute force. It is, in fact, the opposite of raw military power. In between the two is what is called smart power, which is a combination of both. However, soft power is said to be more effective for nations to achieve their national interest on the global scene, rather than military force, which most times backfires and instigates hostilities against the invading force and their countries. Many examples attest to this.

But soft power is not built overnight; it takes conscious efforts and campaigns to get, and is achieved through national branding, which is a collective effort of everyone, especially the media. In a world driven by fierce competition for scarce resources, human and material, nations arm themselves with the right tools to be the top investment destinations. National branding comes in here. What do we want our country to be known for? How do we want outsiders to perceive our country? Let us be clear: there is no society that is free of violent crime, corruption, and other social vices. However, what nations do is to manage their reputations and embark on aggressive country brand to gain global relevance. Nations create a perception about themselves. This is not the exclusive duty of a government. Indeed, as has been mentioned above, soft power is better projected through the third party, especially the media. A nation is not the property of a government; it belongs to everyone living within its space.

Over the last two decades, and even since time immemorial, we have seen different nations of the world embarking on nation branding in different forms. The Incredible India campaign is an example. While it was launched in 2002 by the government of India, we have seen how Indians, irrespective of their beliefs and affiliations, have helped to carry the message to every corner of the world. Our television screen is blessed with different positive portrayals of India. And this has paid off as India has emerged from the ashes of poor reputations of its past. Essential Costa Rica is another great example of nation branding, as is Enterprise Estonia.

“The effect of a nation’s brand on its economy cannot be understated. While a nation’s brand certainly affects its tourism industry, the brand also has powerful effects on the value and volume of the nation’s products and foreign direct investment, which have a direct effect on the nation’s GDP,” David Reibstein said in a publication titled ‘Improving Economic Prosperity through nation branding’. Perception, which is a product of branding, means a lot in how a people are treated. It is immaterial that perception is not always the reality.

Esteemed colleagues, I am urging all of us to take ownership of the Nigerian brand. Our population is surging every day; yet we have limited resources to get everything we need, especially human capital and foreign investments in our economy. But we cannot attract the right investments and human capital if we do not project Nigeria as safe and right for all. If all we do is to record the vilest videos of unsavoury development and splash same on the internet or make it the banner headline that everyone sees across the world, we will be telling the world that our country is not safe. We can tell ourselves about our problems and work together to solve them or make scapegoats of the culprits. What we should stop doing is to put constant spotlight on the downsides of our society. No other nation does that.

Distinguished colleagues, deaths linked to violent crimes in Nigeria stood at 15,245 in 2022. In 2021, deaths associated with gun violence alone in the United States stood at 48,830, a 23% rise since 2019. But while Nigeria is often portrayed as a scary place to be, the United States is seen as a paradise where all is well 24/7. The difference is in the narratives that come with these statistics. While the US media establishments are quick to explain away the violence in their own country, sometimes calling it the acts of lone wolves or depression, the narrative here is often that this is happening because this is a failed system, ran aground by failed and corrupt governments.

The image we carve for our country is what sticks to it. If we call it a failed state because of its imperfections and crises of nation building, which are hardly exclusive to it, the result we get is what we call it. All of the nations we call the bastion of democracy or glamorise with every positives have or have had their own failings or down moments — perhaps worse than ours — which they paper over with nice narratives and excuses in their pursuits of national branding. British author Otto English aptly said this in his work titled Fake History: “The truth is that history is a contested space, and it always has been. It is a battleground of ideas, a place where different interpretations of the past jostle for supremacy.”

Now, I am neither asking the media to abandon its noble roles of being the watchdog of our society nor saying it should renege its duty as the fourth estate of the realm. But I am asking that we strike a deliberate balance between being journalists who report developments and being patriotic citizens and stakeholders who, along with our generations unborn, are also affected by whatever happens to Nigeria. If many cable networks in the ‘democratic’ west deliberately do not convey to the international audience everything that goes wrong in their society or frame such in manners that do not damage their national brand, I appeal that we also de-emphasise negative profiling of our country. I ask that we filter out to the global audience every little downsides of our society. As the Yoruba say, bi onigba ba se pe igba e, la o baa pe. Bi o nigba ba pe igba e ni akufo, a o pe ni akikara.

Esteemed colleagues, editors, and media stakeholders, what we call ourselves is how and what others will call us. Please let us endeavour to give ourselves and our country good names at all times. We owe it a duty and responsibility to ourselves and our children to stand by this country that has given us so much.

Thank you.

•Rafiu Ajakaye, Chief Press Secretary to the Governor of Kwara State, gave this keynote address at the Annual Press Week of the Correspondents’ Chapel (NUJ, Kwara State Council) in Ilorin on November 29, 2023

Opinion

Are Stablecoins Replacing Traditional Banking in Africa? – Bidemi Oke

Published

6 days ago

May 12, 2026

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For years, Africa’s financial story has been told through one statistic: millions of people remain unbanked. But that framing may already be outdated. The more interesting question today is not whether Africans have bank accounts. It is whether banking itself is quietly becoming optional.Across parts of Africa, people are beginning to interact with money without ever touching a traditional bank in the way previous generations did, and stablecoins are at the centre of that shift.Most people still think stablecoins are “crypto” that is the wrong framework. Speculation is not the real story here. Infrastructure is.A stablecoin is simply a digital asset tied to a stable currency, usually the US dollar. Unlike Bitcoin, its value is designed not to fluctuate wildly. But what makes stablecoins important is not the technology itself. It is what they remove.They remove waiting, they remove borders, and they remove conversion friction. And increasingly, they remove dependence on local banking limitations.That changes everything in places where financial inefficiency is expensive.In many African countries, people are not running toward stablecoins because they are fascinated by blockchain technology. They are running toward predictability.A freelancer in Lagos working for a client in London does not want a seven-day transfer process with multiple deductions. A business owner importing goods does not want to lose value between currency conversion windows. A family receiving money from abroad does not want remittance fees eating into already stretched income.Stablecoins solve a very different problem than traditional banks were originally built to solve.Banks were designed around geography. Stablecoins operate around connectivity. That distinction matters more than most people realize.Traditional banking assumes you are financially tied to where you live. Stablecoins assume you are connected to wherever value is moving globally. One system is location-based. The other is internet-based.That is why this shift feels bigger than fintech. What many people call “crypto adoption” in Africa is actually a redesign of financial behaviour. People are choosing speed over institution, access over paperwork and utility over legacy trust systems.Here is what some analysis miss:Stablecoins are not replacing banks because banks are failing completely. They are replacing specific banking functions that no longer justify their friction.That is an important distinction.People still need lending, they still need compliance, they still need financial protection. And they still need identity verification and business financing. But they may no longer need banks to move value from Point A to Point B.That layer is becoming modular. The smartest way to understand this is through what I call the “three-layer money framework.”- Layer one is storage.Where money sits.- Layer two is movement.How money travels.- Layer three is trust.Who legitimacy is verified, and security guaranteedFor decades, banks controlled all three layers simultaneously.Stablecoins are dismantling them.Now, money can be stored in one place, moved through another system entirely and verified by a different network altogether. That unbundling is the real disruption.Africa may become one of the fastest adopters of this model because necessity accelerates innovation faster than convenience ever will.In regions with stable banking systems, people tolerate friction because the system already works reasonably well. In emerging markets, inefficiency creates pressure for alternatives much faster.This is why some African users understand the practical value of stablecoins more clearly than people in wealthier economies do.To them, this is not theory. It is operational. But there is also a danger in oversimplifying what comes next.Stablecoins are not a magic replacement for financial systems. They introduce new risks: regulatory uncertainty, fraud exposure, platform dependency and digital literacy gaps. A financial system cannot scale sustainably without governance.That means the future probably does not belong entirely to banks or entirely to decentralized systems, it belongs to hybrids.Banks that understand this early will survive differently. Instead of competing against stablecoins, they will integrate them. The winners may not be the institutions with the largest branches, but the ones that reduce friction fastest because the future of finance in Africa may not be about who holds the money.It may be about who makes money move most intelligently and that is a very different game from traditional banking.

Opinion

The Visibility Trap

Published

4 weeks ago

April 22, 2026

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There is a persistent assumption in modern business that attention is progress. If people are seeing you,
engaging with you, and talking about you, then you must be growing. On the surface, this feels true. In
practice, it is one of the most expensive misconceptions companies carry.
Visibility is not legitimacy. And confusing the two creates fragile businesses that look successful long
before they actually are.
Visibility is distribution. It is how often you are seen, how far your message travels, and how loudly you
exist in a market. It is driven by campaigns, partnerships, content, and media. It is measurable in
impressions, reach, mentions, and recall.
Legitimacy is something else entirely. It is not what people see. It is what they conclude. It is the quiet but
critical judgement a user makes when deciding whether to trust you with something that matters. Their
money, their time, their reputation, their belief. Legitimacy is not declared. It is inferred. This is where
most companies miscalculate.
A platform can be highly visible and still feel unsafe. It can be everywhere and still feel uncertain. It can
dominate conversations and still fail at conversion when the moment of decision arrives. Because today,
users are not asking, “Have I seen this before?” They are asking, “Do I trust what happens next?”
In financial services, especially in emerging markets, this distinction becomes sharper. Users do not
operate from abundance. They operate from risk awareness. Every transaction is evaluated, consciously or
not, through a lens of potential loss. What could go wrong? How fast can I recover if it does? Who is
accountable if it fails? Visibility does not answer these questions. Legitimacy does.
Legitimacy is built through signals that reduce perceived risk. Not theoretical safety, but experienced
reliability. It shows up in consistency of outcomes, in how predictable your system is under pressure, and
in whether your platform behaves the same way every time, not just when everything is working but also
when something breaks. It is reinforced by clarity. Users trust what they understand, not what is explained
to them in long paragraphs, but what is immediately obvious in interaction. What happens next, how long
it takes and what they can expect. It is strengthened by accountability. Not in policy documents, but in
visible behaviour. How issues are handled, how quickly they are resolved, whether responsibility is
assumed or deflected.
These are not branding elements in the traditional sense. They are operational realities. But this is exactly
where branding is often misunderstood. Brand is not what you say about your product. It is the system of
signals that shape how your product is perceived before, during, and after use. While visibility amplifies
your presence, legitimacy sustains your relevance.
When companies prioritize visibility without building legitimacy, they create a dangerous gap between
expectation and experience. Growth accelerates, but trust does not compound at the same rate. Eventually,

the system corrects itself. Users withdraw, reputation weakens, and recovery becomes significantly harder
than initial growth.
On the other hand, when legitimacy is established first, visibility becomes an accelerator rather than a
risk. Every new user acquired enters a system that can hold them. Every interaction reinforces the same
conclusion. This works; I can rely on this.
This is slower to build, but far more durable. The strategic implication is simple but rarely followed. Do
not ask how to be seen more; ask what conclusions users are forming when they see you. Do not optimise
for attention in isolation, optimise for the alignment between what is promised and what is experienced.
Do not treat trust as a communication problem, treat it as a systems problem that communication must
accurately represent. Because in the end, markets do not reward visibility. They reward reliability that has
been observed, tested, and believed. And that is legitimacy.

Ememobong Udofot E. is a branding and communications executive specialising in strategy, systems
thinking, and trust design within financial technology. She currently leads Branding and Communications
at FlashChange, a digital value exchange platform focused on enabling reliable, efficient movement of
digital assets.
Her work sits at the intersection of brand, product, and growth, where she focuses on building coherent
systems that align what companies promise with what users consistently experience. With a strong
grounding in behavioural insight and market dynamics, she brings a structured, operator-led perspective
to how trust is built, communicated, and sustained in low-trust environments.
Through her writing, Ememobong explores the deeper mechanics of user behaviour, credibility, and
execution in emerging markets, offering clear models and practical thinking shaped by real-world
application.

Opinion

What Nigeria’s Power Sector Trends Signal for Infrastructure Development in 2026

Published

3 months ago

February 14, 2026

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Recent trends in Nigeria’s power sector suggest that infrastructure development will be the defining factor shaping electricity performance in 2026, despite notable policy and revenue reforms recorded over the past two years.

The years 2024 and 2025 marked a pivotal phase for the sector, with electricity market revenues growing by approximately 70 per cent following the introduction of cost-reflective tariffs and the launch of the National Integrated Electricity Policy (NIEP), a long-term framework designed to address regulatory, investment, and structural challenges.

However, these reforms have yet to translate into proportional improvements in power delivery. Despite an installed generation capacity estimated at 12,000–13,500 megawatts, actual available generation in 2025 rarely exceeded 5,500 MW, highlighting persistent constraints across gas supply, transmission, and distribution infrastructure.

According to Tola Ibironke, General Manager, Systems Engineering at PPC Limited (www.ppcng.com), this contrast reflects a sector that has begun to stabilise financially but now faces its most critical test: execution.

“Nigeria has made meaningful progress in fixing the economics of the power sector,” Ibironke said. “The next phase must focus on fixing the infrastructure, strengthening transmission systems, modernising distribution networks, and deploying resilient power solutions, without which policy gains cannot be fully realised.”

Regional comparisons reinforce this point. Countries such as Ghana, with smaller generation capacity, have achieved higher electricity access and more reliable supply by aligning policy reforms with systematic infrastructure upgrades and sustained grid investment.

As Nigeria looks toward 2026, PPC Limited, drawing on its experience in engineering and infrastructure services, notes that reliability, resilience, and system integration, rather than headline capacity figures, will define success in the power sector.

Ibironke added that the conversation is increasingly shifting from how much power Nigeria can generate to how reliably it can deliver it, placing infrastructure development at the centre of the sector’s future.