So, another “savior” has landed, and this time she’s carrying a briefcase full of Washington policy papers and $50 million in “hybrid” funding. Akunna Cook, a former Foreign Service officer who’s spent more time in Baghdad and D.C. than in a chaotic Nairobi film set, thinks she’s found the secret sauce to making African content “scale.” She calls it the Next Narrative Africa Fund. I call it a very expensive way to tell us that our stories aren’t good enough until they’ve been sanitized by a “writers’ room” and checked for “messaging objectives.”

Let’s be real: $50 million is pocket change in Hollywood - it’s basically the catering budget for a mid-tier Marvel movie. But out here, they’re parading it like a digital Marshall Plan. Cook talks about her time weaving “wonky” policy into Scandal and Black-ish like it’s a badge of honor. Great, so now instead of a gripping thriller, we’re going to get scripts about gerrymandering and “strategic assets” disguised as entertainment. If I wanted a lecture on public policy, I’d tune into a government presser, not pay for a cinema ticket.

The most insulting part is this obsession with the “development gap.” Cook claims that on the continent, we move from idea to filming in six weeks because we don’t “invest” in development. No, darling, we move in six weeks because the rent is due, the power might go out tomorrow, and we don’t have the luxury of sitting in a plush D.C. office for two years “massaging a narrative.” To these people, “properly developed” just means “palatable to a suburban audience in Maryland.”

She mentions that 2,000 people applied for her fund in three weeks. She thinks that’s “pent-up demand.” I think it’s a sign of how desperate our creators are for even a crumb of capital that they’ll jump through whatever hoops a former State Department official sets up. It’s the same old story of outsiders coming in to “reclassify” our exports. It reminds me of The Green Colonization: Kenya’s Silent Sacrifice for Global Net-Zero - another case of global players deciding our resources are “strategic assets” for their own agendas while we provide the “silent sacrifice.”

And then there’s the “local for local” critique. Cook thinks the problem is that we aren’t thinking globally enough. She wants “African solutions to global problems.” Translation: she wants stories that look like us but sound like them. They want the aesthetic of Lagos or Nairobi, but with the soul of a Netflix algorithm. If the “smart money” is looking south, it’s only because they’ve run out of ideas in the north and need fresh “IP” to colonize before the next quarterly earnings report.

At the end of the day, the question isn’t who will own the storytelling when it scales, but who will actually benefit. If history is any guide, the $10 million in “nonprofit development funding” will mostly go to consultants, advisory boards, and “veterans of talent management” in L.A., while the actual director in Riverwood is still trying to figure out how to bypass a corrupt “Kanjo” officer just to get a street shot. Wake me up when the money actually hits the dirt, not just the headlines in The Hollywood Reporter.