TechCabal Want to Join (the) Forces

It was the Infinix Note 3 launch. I was conducting interviews and he said, “come and teach me all these production TV things now?” I smiled and muttered something around “you can come to our studio anytime, its just at…”. I was just being nice because Bankole Oluwafemi had also made endless imaginary visits to our video studio and at the time all I could vouch for was that Osarumen Osamuyi had a good camera angle (actually a fairly long arm) with the selfie he took us.

Well, what do you know? He was actually serious and something in me attested to it at the Infinix launch, so when news got out that Osarumen was being promoted (shout Halleluyah, somebody) to Head of Production Big Cabal barely a year after joining the team, it meant one more player in the video content game with yours truly and excitedly so. In a most conceited post on his Medium (TL;DR), he chronicles his journey at TechCabal and it is glaring to see how passionate the man is about what he’s ever done. No matter how fleeting and random. He refers to a scene in War Boys many times for emphasis on his new move and how much adrenaline that gives him. Pretty intense stuff. But will he be doing anything different as a production guy?

He is no politician so he does not exactly have a manifesto nor has he made any campaign promises but he very succinctly highlighted the tech and internet situation in Africa as one that is quite paradoxical.

…Internet penetration is doing as internet penetration does — going up, while data prices are doing as data prices do — going down. Even though incomes aren’t rising, this creates an interesting situation. Soon, we’ll have lots of young Africans who have access to all this internet bandwidth…and nothing to do with it. Dis gon’ be gud.

Therein lies the problem, the capacity to produce content with potential of voracious consumption. And the need to curate the African tech (pop) culture for Africans and not the rest of the world being on the rise makes his appointment a timely one. Partly because we at TechCity happen to be the only ones who are neck deep in audio-visual documentary, content creation and reportage of the ecosystem and because we need more people telling African stories in these formats and more. Simple. Or so it seems but a high precedence has been set and it has formed the basis for a lot more players to draw inspiration from. “It’s not going to be easy, but then the only thing I’m passionate about is solving hard problems.” Osarumen admits.

All the best, mate and welcome on board the league of (extraordinary) screen producers. And, when do you and Bankole finally show up at our office eh?