What Happens When a High-Profile Company Pulls Out of the Continent?

When Prime Video launched its local service in Africa in August 2022, the news was expectedly met with excitement. Although the streamer had already been available on the continent since 2016, the official expansion into the African market featured standard Prime Video offerings including subtitles, local-language interfaces and best of all, original content. The announcement meant a new platform for African filmmakers, and the emergence of a strong competitor to Netflix (the first international streaming giant to make an entry into large parts of the African market), such that filmmakers could potentially shop their work and be commissioned at competitive prices. Original projects like Gangs of Lagos, She Must Be Obeyed, Breath Of Life and other original releases were well received, marking a new era for content.

Amidst all of this excitement, however, Nigerian film business journalist and co-founder of Nigerian film publication, In Nollywood, Anita E. Eboigbe was skeptical. She tells OkayAfrica that In Nollywood did its own analysis and found Prime Video’s approach lethargic; the way it was securing customers seemed unsustainable, and was setting up the expansion for failure. This is why, when the streamer announced in January 2024 that it would be cutting funding for the African and Middle Eastern market, barely two years into its expansion, Eboigbe says she wasn’t shocked.

But a slow marketing strategy doesn’t seem to be the only reason for the streamer’s sudden exit. Industry experts like Eboigbe have pointed to the fact that Prime Video seemed out of place for a product that is part of an ecosystem. Prime Video’s parent company, Amazon, does not offer other services in Africa, making it difficult for many to fully understand and interact with the single available entity.

There was also the relationship Prime Video had built with filmmakers. “It helps when you have another player, when you can negotiate terms and weigh your options,” says Eboigbe. “However, where the options worked in terms of multiple outlets, marketing and promotion fell short. It always fell on the filmmakers to market their films. One of the main reasons why people make films is so there is room for the next one, and that wasn’t happening with a lot of Prime [Video] projects, even when it came to commissioning fresh ideas. I don’t know that there was a clear thesis about the ideas Prime [Video] wanted to commission, and that also affected the way people interacted with them.”

Productions Prime Video had already commissioned before the news came out have been impacted, like Funmilayo, which was due to be released this month, while others, like Japa and A Green Fever, were released with little-to-no publicity. According to industry insiders and people who have worked with the company, the future of the streamer will likely revert to licensing and uploading ready-made projects onto the platform – a move that’s dissuading many Nigerian filmmakers from continuing a relationship in any capacity with Prime Video.

But this kind of abrupt disruption is not particular to the film world. X (formerly known as Twitter) is another example of a big-name company making an abrupt exit from the continent and leaving a disruptive trail in its wake. More than a year after former X employees in Ghana were let go and their department dissolved in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition, the team only received the final payout the company promised them in February 2024. Represented by Accra-based business advisory firm Agency Seven Seven, team members revealed that while they were initially promised payment to continue to work for one more month despite their contract termination, they were swiftly locked out of their devices after being notified of their termination.

For the less than 20-person team, this meant receiving updates on the status of their employment and expected redundancy payment from social media and media outlets. Bernard Kafui Sokpe was a senior partner manager while working at X. He tells OkayAfrica that the experience took a toll on him and his colleagues. “It took a while to register in our minds,” he says. “I was in the middle of an unprecedented Twitter launch for Black Panther 2 on the continent, and at the same time finally settling the team into the Africa office in Accra, which I had worked hard on for a year to achieve. It took me a while to process it all whilst being hassled for information by family, friends and eager journalists from all over the world. It was quite overwhelming whilst trying to think of the next steps.”

Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter had launched a well-lauded expansion into the continent in April of 2021, attracting some of the continent’s brightest creative and tech minds, drawn from different backgrounds, from editorial to marketing.

Sokpe describes Twitter as an amazing place to have worked. “It gave me the creative license to execute and make an impact on the continent in a way that I had always dreamt of,’ he says. "It was a blank sheet for Africa and a super powerful position to be amplifying the loudest voices on the continent." The social media app’s formal entry into the African continent also spelled good news for many African creatives who had come to rely on Twitter for connection and amplification. Ghanaian writer and filmmaker Joewackle Kusi was one of the first creatives invited to test out Twitter’s writers-focused initiative, Twitter Write. For established and emerging writers like Kusi on the continent, the initiative was a welcome opportunity. “It was super exciting for me and I had built a community with other writers, and when Elon took over, it really crashed something for us.”

Some of the employees had only recently joined the company when the layoffs were announced. Others who had moved from countries like Nigeria to Ghana to work at the headquarters have revealed in news reports that they found themselves stranded and without the financial resources that a payout would have helped with. The agency representing the former employees also alleged that X repeatedly ignored many of the agreed deadlines for settlement, locking in the employees in a year-long battle that is finally over. For Sokpe, who now runs Ghana’s first creator hub, this payout represents justice for him and his former colleagues: “It’s been a long journey but I am happy everything has been concluded to satisfaction.”

But the whole issue has also brought up concerns around labor relations between international companies and the countries they hire from on the continent. Sokpe hopes that stricter labor laws will be passed in Ghana to help protect Ghanaians working for international companies so that cases like this are less likely to repeat themselves. “I’m just happy we stood up for what we deserved. Hopefully, this episode goes a long way to inspire other Africans who are being served the short end of the stick in any corporate employer dealings, to rise and demand what's deserved,” he says.

Adding to this issue is the conversation around how African creatives are often on the back burner when working for, or with, foreign big-name companies. “The African creative landscape is usually the scapegoat,” Eboigbe says. “People come here, they try stuff out, sometimes they are exploitative and they decide, ‘This isn’t working for me,’ and they leave. Ultimately, it’s a thing where we can’t keep waiting for people to save us.”