Warri queen tells Africa to own its creative wealth, not just make it

The wife of the Olu of Warri has asked African governments, investors and business leaders to stop cheering from the sidelines and start owning the money their music, films and fashion earn around the world.

Olori Atuwatse III said Africa takes home roughly one dollar out of every hundred dollars that global trade in creative goods generates. She spoke on the second day of the Elevate Africa Convening 2026 in Accra, Ghana, where the theme was "Africa: Defining Her Future."

Her point was simple: Afrobeats fills stadiums abroad, Nollywood sells African stories to foreign audiences, and African fabrics walk global runways. Yet the labels, rights and distribution deals often sit in other hands.

"The rhythm is ours. The colour is ours. Too often, the receipt is made out to someone else,"

she said, asking who owns the label, who holds the rights and who takes the profit home.

Learning from Hollywood and Seoul

She held up the United States and South Korea as examples of countries that turned culture into hard cash. Hollywood, Korean skincare and Korean television dramas, she said, made people believe in those stories, and their money followed that belief.

Africa, she argued, has plenty of that soft power. What it lacks are the business structures to keep the value at home. She urged leaders to build platforms and business models that let African creatives own, distribute and profit from their own work.

On young people, she noted that the continent's median age is about 19. Young Africans are already starting businesses and finding solutions with little capital or support, she said, and asked whether institutions are moving at the same pace as them.

She named the Elevate Africa Fellowship as one effort to widen opportunities for young Africans and called on other institutions to back similar programmes.

She also pushed for closer ties between Africans at home and people of African descent in the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere. Quoting former Mauritian president Ameenah Gurib-Fakim on the dignity lost through the transatlantic slave trade, she said the effects still show in institutions and daily life.

"That loss of dignity was built by a narrative. And what one narrative built, another can rebuild,"

she said. She warned against insulting labels used between Africans on the continent and those abroad, saying that turning each other away amounts to turning away from themselves.

She recalled the first Homecoming held in the Warri Kingdom two months ago to mark the anniversary of the Olu's coronation, saying it had begun building lasting partnerships with the diaspora. She also urged governments to make it easier for Black investors from the West to put money into Africa, citing the historic Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroyed in a racist massacre in 1921.

Ghana's Minister of Tourism and Creative Arts, Abla Gomashie, said the world has long viewed Africa through a single lens, as a source of cocoa, gold and other minerals. She said the gathering should help change that by putting the talent and creativity of Africans first.

Other speakers included Nicole Asinugo of The Osahon Okunbo Foundation, Ama Ofeibea Tetteh and Dr Slyleecia Thompson. Royal dignitaries at the event signed the Accra Declaration, and Adekola Emmanuel, winner of the 2026 Thread of Africa, received a $25,000 cheque.

What happens next

The Accra Declaration is now signed, but the sources do not say what it commits signatories to. For Nigerian creatives, the test will be whether such talk turns into financing, rights ownership and platforms that keep more of the money in Lagos, Warri and Accra rather than abroad.