Kemi Omotosho was recently named CEO of MultiChoice Nigeria, effective January 2026, succeeding John Ugbe who retired after nearly 15 years on the job.
By all means, Omotosho’s track record makes her a perfect fit for the job. She was MultiChoice Nigeria’s Head of Retention (2014), Executive Head of Customer Value Management (2018), Group Executive Head of CVM (2019), then Regional Director for Southern Africa (seven-country portfolio). So, her competence is not the problem but the timing of her appointment.
Kemi Omotosho is stepping into Nigeria’s harshest consumer economy in years.
On paper, being CEO of a pay-TV giant is a glamorous kind of stress. Having to joggle between continued subscriber decline, competition from streaming platforms, premieres, sports rights etc., is a different kind of glamour.
That’s the chair Kemi Omotosho has been asked to sit in.
A biochemistry degree, then the telecom foundation
Omotosho did not train for television. She studied Biochemistry at the University of Ilorin, later added a postgraduate diploma in management at the Nigerian Institute of Management, and earned an Executive MBA at Lagos Business School.
She built part of her foundation at Airtel Nigeria in roles tied to retention, enterprise accounts, and revenue optimisation before joining MultiChoice.
If you’ve ever worked in Nigerian customer-facing jobs, you understand what that means without anyone over-explaining it. You’ll learn patience, pattern recognition, and how to keep your tone polite while solving problems that should not exist in the first place.
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Climbing by solving the hardest problem first
Her MultiChoice ascent is unusually traceable. She joined the group in 2014 as Head of Retention, one of those roles that sounds small until you understand that if customers don’t renew, nothing else matters.
By 2018 she was promoted to Executive Head of Customer Value Management, and by 2019 she rose again to become Group Executive Head of Customer Value Management.
In March 2024, MultiChoice appointed her Regional Director for Southern Africa operations, a role described as overseeing a seven-country portfolio with profit-and-loss responsibility. And then came the full circle – back to Nigeria, this time as CEO.
Her predecessor, John Ugbe once described the company as an “inclusive workplace” where people rise “irrespective of their gender and nationality.” It reads like corporate and a politically correct phrase until you place it beside Kemi Omotosho’s timeline and notice the consistency.
Her work meets Nigeria’s reality
To understand what she’s inheriting, you have to understand Nigeria’s current entertainment economy. People still want stories, but they now ration subscriptions the way they ration data.
In March 31, 2025, MultiChoice’s active subscribers fell by 1.2 million to 14.5 million, and Nigeria accounted for a large share of “Rest of Africa” subscriber losses. Between April and September 2024, MultiChoice lost 243,000 subscribers in Nigeria as households pulled back and sought cheaper options.
Then MultiChoice Nigeria’s subscription revenue fell 44% to about $197.74 million (ZAR 3.5 billion) in the year ending March 2025, down from $355.93 million (ZAR 6.3 billion) the prior year.
This is where Omotosho’s professional “edge” becomes unusually relevant. Her career has been built around customer value, how to reduce churn, lift usage, and keep people paying without losing them. In Nigeria’s current climate, “retention” is not a department; it’s the whole strategy.
She has also publicly framed Nigeria as central to the group’s future. “Nigeria remains one of the Group’s most strategic markets,” she said in the appointment statement, adding that she wants to deepen consumer relationships, champion local storytelling, and build “a future-ready organization.”
Power, policy, and the price of television
No CEO operates in a vacuum, especially not in Nigerian media. One pressure point is regulation, particularly around pricing.
In March 2025, Nigeria’s Federal Competition & Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) announced it had filed charges against MultiChoice, stating the company proceeded with a March 1 price increase after a directive to maintain pricing pending examination.
In May 2025, the FCCPC also announced an Abuja Federal High Court struck out MultiChoice’s suit seeking to restrain the commission from investigating price increases.
This matters for Kemi Omotosho because her mandate includes not only customers, but the delicate choreography of corporate decision-making.
Let’s add the corporate layer. Canal+ took effective control of MultiChoice in September 2025, with integration steps following. A Nigeria CEO in 2026 isn’t only managing Lagos; she’s translating Nigeria’s realities upward into a Group strategy now shaped by new controlling interests.
A “builder” in a noisy industry
What’s striking about Kemi Omotosho, at least from the track record available, is how ‘uncelebrity’ her rise has been. She is not famous in the Nigerian way. No viral persona. No performative hustle sermons. Her reputation, as described in multiple profiles, is systems, teams, planning, execution.
That kind of leadership can look quiet until the moment it’s tested. And MultiChoice Nigeria is a daily test.
If Omotosho is a “builder,” the building here is not abstract. It is a set of choices about affordability, product design, customer experience, and how Nigerian creative work is financed and distributed at scale. Her own appointment statement explicitly ties the job to “local storytelling” and the creative economy.
The wider signal in her story for African professionals is technical expertise does not have to be trapped in middle management. In a continent that often celebrates founders more than operators, Omotosho’s rise is a reminder that builders of large systems, especially customer-facing ones, are also nation-shapers.
Her measurable impact will show up in boring places: churn rates, subscriber counts, product adoption, regulatory outcomes, and how successfully MultiChoice navigates a price-sensitive Nigeria without losing relevance.
But the cultural impact is less boring. Nigeria’s entertainment market is one of Africa’s loudest export engines. If MultiChoice’s platform remains strong—and if it keeps funding and distributing Nigerian stories—then her leadership affects not just what Nigerians watch, but what Africa sells to itself and to the world.
