What People Get Wrong About Nigeria’s Tech Media

The ecosystem tax on honesty

Feb 01, 2026

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What People Get Wrong About Nigeria’s Tech Media

There is a genre of writing that pops up every few months in tech: founders complaining about journalists, journalists complaining about founders, everyone insisting they are the only adult in the room, and then some venture capitalist tweeting “this is why we need more founder-led media” or whatever.

This genre is boring, but not because there is no tension between founders and journalists. There will always be tension between founders and journalists, just as there will always be tension between teenagers and their parents, or between people and the mirrors that show them what they look like in fluorescent lighting.

It is boring because it treats a permanent condition as if it were a scandal. “Oh no,” the founder says, “you described my decision as a ‘sale’ when I prefer to think of it as a ‘strategic alignment of shareholder outcomes.’ Anything for the clicks, I guess.”

And the journalist shoots back with a Substack post, “Oh no, the founder is trying to control the narrative.” And everyone is shocked. But that is what everyone is doing, all the time.

The more interesting question that deserves more words and Substack posts is, why is it so difficult to run a good Nigerian tech publication?

I don’t mean the usual problems. Yes, advertising revenues are in the gutter, social media platforms make overnight changes that destroy pageviews, and the readers who swear they love smart journalism are lowkey reading Instblog9ja. These are all real problems by the way. But they’re not the thing.

The thing in Nigeria is what I’m calling the Media Theory of Being Hampered by Context.

In an ideal version of journalism, “Can I provide context?” means: I think you got a fact wrong, and I would like to correct it.

Like, you wrote that the company raised $10 million, and it actually raised $12 million, or you wrote that the CEO joined in 2020, and she joined in 2019. Great. Fixed. Journalism works.

In Nigeria’s tech ecosystem, “can I provide context?” often means: the facts may be right, but can we renegotiate what they mean?

This is not necessarily sinister!

Business is complicated, people change their minds, and strategies evolve. Most things are not as simple as “good” and “bad.” And journalism is supposed to be fair, and fairness requires hearing from the other side, and the other side often has some reasonable explanation for why the thing you think looks odd is actually totally normal.

But the Nigerian twist is that in a small ecosystem, hearing from the other side can easily become a relationship event.

You are not just emailing a press office. You are calling someone you might see next week. You are asking a friend-of-a-friend to comment on a story about another friend-of-a-friend. You are doing it in a culture where sensitive things are handled with calls, not emails, and where the call is a part of a social ritual. The “why are you doing this?” and “do you really need to report this?” are the undercurrent of those conversations.

Nigeria’s tech ecosystem is an “everyone has everyone’s gist” industry. People know things. People share things. There’s just an unspoken gentleman’s agreement to treat the gist with care.

So journalists end up facing a strange question: why are you giving out this gist? Why are you taking something we all know privately and putting it on the record where it becomes real?

But nature abhors a vacuum. When journalists don’t publish what they know and when stories get softened into harmlessness, or killed entirely, the void gets filled by hot takes, long threads, and confident nonsense. Sometimes it’s the truth. Sometimes it’s fiction. Often it’s a cocktail of both.

Which is where context comes in. Context is the respectable, professional word for “let’s not make this awkward.” It’s how gist stays gist and also how reporting gets negotiated down from “here’s what happened” to “here’s what everyone can live with.”

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Last week, I listened to the Open Africa podcast, which I highly recommend, and it included some Nigerian tech journalism bashing. Some of it was fair, which is always a crowd-pleaser. At some point in the conversation, the hosts toyed with the idea of starting their own publication, which is also a permanent feature of the ecosystem. Everyone who knows a lot about tech thinks they could run a newsroom better.

Days after that episode, the founder of Mono pushed back on Twitter about how the podcast hosts characterised his decision to sell the company. He used the phrase founders always use when they want to sound like they have caught you doing bad journalism: “something something you did this for the clicks, I guess.”

You could tell, listening to the podcast, that the hosts were trying to be charitable. They were doing the normal journalistic thing of being careful, of giving space for nuance, of not sounding like they were trying to embarrass anyone. And yet the founder still felt mischaracterized.

This is a structural feature of technology journalism.

Founders are in the narrative business. They are raising money, hiring talent, selling to customers, negotiating with regulators, and maintaining morale. A characterization is an important intangible asset, so good luck convincing them that your framing is neutral. A founder will push back even when the story is not a hit piece, because they’re always managing mark-to-market values of reputation.

Journalists, on the other hand, are in the meaning business. They take facts and try to assemble them into something that helps readers understand what is happening. And “what is happening” is often not the founder’s preferred story.

So the founder asks for context. The journalist provides room for context. And the story is repriced. If you want to see the game clearly, throw money into the mix.

Imagine a startup has paid you a lot of money over the course of the year, and now you have to write a story that is critical of them.

Not an exposé. Not “the CEO committed fraud,” which is obviously newsworthy and, in theory, unavoidable. I mean something much more common and much more uncomfortable: a story that asks boring but obvious questions.

Like: why should anyone believe this pivot, when the last pivot was also presented as the final form? Or: how are you really defining profitability if I can’t see your books? Or: if this product is so transformative, why is adoption limited to the founder’s Twitter followers and three family members?

These are not questions about bad behavior. They are just the questions you would ask if you’re not hypnotized by access. (To be fair, access and relationships are scarce. Money is also scarce. That scarcity expresses itself through context.)

The company will not call you and say, “Do not publish.” That would be gauche.

Instead, they offer a conversation to provide context. It’s essentially what Nigerians do on sensitive matters: use the phone call to make sure the relationship is intact.

And because the market is thin and the publication is fragile and because you might need that relationship later, you may find yourself editing a sentence here and there. You fix temperature and tone. You remove a word that feels too sharp. You add a paragraph that frames the company’s story as still early. You include the explanation as if it resolves the question, when really it just explains why the company prefers you not ask.

And you tell yourself you are being fair. And maybe you are. But fairness, in this setting, has a directional bias of drifting toward the subject’s preferred framing.

This is why a lot of Nigerian tech coverage ends up being factually fine but essentially flat. By trying to manage the story and appease founders and relationships, you set the reading public on the wrong course.

So when journalists say “the ecosystem is mature enough for more criticality,” people often hear “we should report on more scandals.” Sure. But what the ecosystem actually needs is a less glamorous kind of criticality: the routine skepticism that doesn’t treat every product launch like a coronation.

Which brings me back to the people who want to start their own publications because they believe journalists are doing a bad job.

You might be right! You might be able to do it better. You might have more operational knowledge, more nuance, and better instincts about what matters.

But you will run into the same problem because it is not really a journalism skill issue. It is a market structure issue.

The question is less “can you write” and more can you publish common-sense skepticism about your friends, in a small ecosystem, in a thin market, when ‘context’ arrives as a phone call and the phone call is really a negotiation over meaning?

Because in Nigeria, context is something that tries to own your story.

That’s it. See you next week! Don’t forget to like, share, and leave a comment.

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