Earlier this year, a client asked my agency to help amplify a campaign they were proud of. When we reviewed what they were already putting out, we found messaging that, however well-intentioned, carried real regulatory exposure: claims and framing that went beyond what the rules permitted for a company at their stage and in their sector.
They didn’t need amplification; they needed someone to tell them to pull back before a regulator did. We redrew the entire brief, shifted the work from product promotion to corporate reputation building, and set written boundaries around what the campaign could and could not say. The story they wanted to tell was a good one. It just could not be told the way they were telling it.
That, in miniature, is the counsel function. It is the oldest and most consequential thing a strategic communications professional does, and across Africa’s tech sector, it is the discipline most at risk of being designed out of the room.
The corporate storyteller is having a moment, and the moment is earned. In December 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that LinkedIn job postings mentioning “storyteller” had doubled in the previous year, with more than 50,000 marketing listings and 20,000 media and communications listings using the term.
More recently, Communiqué’s Oritsejolomi Otomewo argued that the role is becoming essential as the continent’s biggest tech companies outgrow their challenger status and need a coherent institutional account of themselves. He is right. A company that serves millions and answers to regulators cannot rely on a founder’s candour to carry the narrative. It needs someone to gather the experiences, people and decisions that explain what the business stands for and to tell those stories with discipline across every channel.
The danger is in what gets displaced. When companies invest in storytelling, they tend to treat it as an upgrade from corporate communications, which too many people still describe as custodial and reactive, the business of press releases and crisis clean-up. And in that framing, the counsel function- the strategic intelligence that holds the whole enterprise together under pressure- quietly disappears from the job description.
Look at what happens when a company builds the narrative and leaves the counsel behind. Moniepoint built one of the most formidable storytelling operations in Nigerian fintech: an Informal Economy Report adopted by the federal government as a policy resource, a documentary series, an AI chatbot, and a story of faith in the resilience of ordinary Nigerians that ran through everything the company published.
Yet, on Workers’ Day, its CEO told a roomful of people that the company struggled to find candidates who met its standards, and the entire architecture buckled under the weight of a single unscripted remark. Chowdeck’s case carries the same lesson. Its co-founder’s comments about rider earnings, perfectly serviceable as a recruitment pitch when the company was a challenger, became a liability the moment the company became the category leader and the public expected a different posture toward the people who deliver its food.
Both companies had storytellers. What was absent was the counsel function: someone with the standing, the instinct, and the institutional trust to sit across from a chief executive before a public appearance and say, “This is how that statement will land, and here is why you should reconsider.” Public relations, at its most strategic, is precisely that intervention.
Think of it as the difference between the building and the scaffolding. The storyteller designs the building: the rooms, the facade, and the way light moves through the corridors. Beautiful, essential work. But the scaffolding is what keeps the structure standing while it is being built, what holds it together when a storm comes through, and what allows workers to reach the places where cracks are forming before those cracks become visible from the street.
Reputation audits, stakeholder mapping, media relationships that take years to earn, and message discipline that catches the gap between what a leader means and what the public hears – this is scaffolding work. It is invisible when it works, and its absence is catastrophic when it doesn’t. My experience with that client was a scaffolding moment. The building was fine. The story was sound. But someone needed to inspect the structure before they opened the doors, and the people producing the content were too close to the narrative to see where the regulatory cracks were forming.
The real risk for African tech companies is that they will hire storytellers and believe they have solved the communications problem. The in-house narrative builder and the strategic communications partner are complementary disciplines, and companies that treat them as interchangeable will keep producing the failures we have already seen this year. One designs the building. The other inspects the scaffolding.
The person who tells a CEO what to reconsider before a public appearance, who holds the media relationships that earn the company a fair hearing when a narrative runs ahead of the facts, and who maps the stakeholders and stress-tests the message before it leaves the room: we have been calling that person a communications professional for decades. The corporate storyteller does not replace that work. The corporate storyteller makes it more visible, more necessary, and, if the company is wise, more central to how it governs itself.
African tech needs both the architect and the scaffolder. It needs them in the same room, early enough to matter.
Edward Israel-Ayide is the founder/CEO of Carpe Diem Solutions, a strategic communications agency. One of African PR Week’s Nigeria’s Top 10 Men in Public Relations for 2026, he advises organisations across financial services, technology, consumer goods and the public sector.
Related News
