Two and a half decades of boardroom and practical operating observation and consulting, across Africa and other continents, distilled into five frameworks for a stronger career, leadership, and inner life.
The Storyteller Before the Algorithm
Malik Afegbua studied business. Then someone gave him a camera, and the direction changed. He built a film studio in Lagos — Slick City Media — producing commercials, documentary films, and virtual reality exhibitions. For six years before AI tools became widely available, he worked with VR. "I always do research to find innovative ways," he said in an interview with Technext24 in January 2023. "Six years ago, I started working with virtual reality. That led me to artificial intelligence."
By the time the AI image tools went mainstream, Afegbua had been working with them for approximately two years. He was not a hobbyist discovering a new toy. He was a professional craftsperson who had been developing his fluency with a new instrument, the way a filmmaker develops fluency with a new camera system or a composer learns a new software.
His mother suffered a stroke. "It has been incredibly hard, as I have always been close to her," he said. "I found myself imagining a place where she would be happy." He wanted to show her demographic community — elderly African men and women — not in a suppressed state, but as dignified, elegant, fully alive. He thought about fashion. Then he thought: what if he put them on the runway?
The Critical Challenge — What the AI Could Not See
Here is what matters most about the Afegbua case for the MOAT Skill Stack. When he tried to generate images of elderly African people in traditional Nigerian clothing, the AI pushed back. Its training data was biased — the corpus of images it had learned from skewed heavily toward a particular historical representation of Africa.
"I realised that the AI was biased," he told Salzburg Global. "So I literally had to train it to make it understand what we really look like. Not the biased image from the internet." He had to invest his specific knowledge — of African faces, African textiles, African cultural tradition — into the prompting process. He used three different AI image tools, going back and forth to refine the results until the models reflected what he was actually seeing in his mind.
This is the Adjacent Advantages component of the MOAT Skill Stack made visible. Any creative professional with access to the same tools could generate AI fashion images. Only someone with Afegbua's combination — the storytelling eye, the knowledge of African fashion tradition (gele, fila, Afro-futuristic styling), the cultural empathy, the filmmaking instincts around lighting and composition, and the specific point of view about age and dignity — could produce The Elder Series.
The Response — What the MOAT Produced
When Afegbua posted the images in January 2023, Ruth Carter — the Oscar-winning costume designer behind the Black Panther films — commented on Instagram: "This is so dope!!" CNN, the BBC, and news outlets globally ran the story. The BBC described him as an "AI artist." He corrected the framing every time: "I am a storyteller. The backbone for everything I do is storytelling."
The World Health Organization praised the series as a positive contributor to the WHO/UN Decade of Healthy Ageing campaign against ageism. Afegbua received invitations to exhibit in France, Brazil, and the United States. The Elder Series was shown at Design Week Lagos 2023. The wave that many artists feared would erase human creativity became the vehicle that extended his reach beyond anything his previous work had produced.
AI did not erase those strengths. It amplified them. The same wave that many artists feared might displace them became the wave that carried his work to galleries and conferences across Africa, the Americas and Europe.
I.S. Matthew, 5M Unbreakable (2026), Chapter 4: ProtectionAfegbua’s MOAT Skill Stack — Mapped
| Component | What it looks like in Afegbua’s case |
|---|---|
| Master Craft | Storytelling — "the backbone for everything I do." Specifically: finding new visual ways to tell stories that shift how people see marginalised communities. |
| Outsize Outcomes | WHO endorsement for contribution to healthy ageing campaign. CNN and BBC global coverage. Invitations to exhibit in France, Brazil, USA. Design Week Lagos 2023. |
| Adjacent Advantages | Knowledge of African textile and fashion traditions (gele, fila, Afro-futuristic styling). Filmmaking instincts around lighting, composition, and character. Six years of VR experience. Two years of AI tool fluency with multiple platforms. Specific cultural empathy and point of view on age and dignity. |
| Transferable Options | Physical exhibitions across three continents. Documentary and VR work ongoing. NFT show in Brazil. Speaking and conference engagements. The Elder Series as a continuing platform rather than a single project. |
The diagnostic question from Chapter 4: look at each component of your own stack. How specific is your craft statement? How verifiable are your outcomes? Where are your adjacent advantages — and which ones are you deliberately building? And how many doors could you move through if your current title disappeared tomorrow?