A message from our new CEO
26 February 2024 - We recently announced the appointment of our next CEO, Ebele Okobi. With substantial leadership experience in human rights and policy in tech and social media, Ebele's appointment is a move aimed at widening TNH’s impact at an important time for the organisation. Below is a personal message from Ebele to TNH readers.
I have been reading a book that I adore, called The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way, by Sara Ahmed. One of the chapters describes a hazard of exposing problems, which is that the person exposing the problem is then called, themselves, a problem, for disturbing the comfort of those who benefit from the problem. A defining characteristic of my life has been being a problem. I have been a problem inadvertently, by merely existing as a Black woman, and deliberately, by being a Black woman asking inconvenient questions, with strong convictions about justice and abuse of power.
I am a daughter of Nigeria’s 3,000-year-old Igbo nation. Igbos have also had representative democracy for that long, with powerful roles for women. A defining Igbo motto is NDI IGBO ENWE EZE. This means the Igbo don’t have kings – we have always rejected hereditary monarchy, we bow to no one and every human is believed to have their own direct connection to the ancestors and to divinity. As you can imagine, this made us extremely inconvenient for the British colonisers. My maternal grandmother was an organiser of the 1929-30 Aba Women’s War, one of the first large-scale organised 20th century uprisings against colonial rule. While the women were brutally attacked and many were killed, the series of protests resulted in the ejection of the puppet government “warrant chief” system and the inclusion of women in self-rule.
The political and economic marginalisation of the Igbo by the British, as a result of the Igbo insistence upon representative democracy, eventually birthed the Biafran War. That humanitarian crisis foreshadowed many of the issues that the humanitarian sector is grappling with today, from the limits and politicisation of humanitarian aid to telling the stories of African conflicts through the white gaze, to coloniality as a too-often ignored cause of humanitarian crises. The genocide of my people during that war, including the murder of my paternal grandfather, who was killed during the infamous Asaba Massacre, is one of a long list of unnamed genocides.
Being a problem is my heritage.
Given my heritage, and my bone-deep knowledge that I stand on the shoulders of giants, the question that I have always asked is how can I be in service to the most marginalised. As a corporate lawyer, I spent most of my time on my pro bono practice, representing domestic violence survivors and political asylum applicants. At Yahoo, I built and led the human rights program, a legal and policy team that mitigated risks related to free expression globally. At Facebook, I built a team across Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey that co-created, with humility, an enabling policy environment for people, not companies. We centered preventing and mitigating harm from company platforms and fiercely protected the space for free expression and local voices.
I come to this role with a burning interest in impact. TNH’s mission is to deliver high-quality, fact-based journalism, in order to prevent and mitigate humanitarian crises. With our work, we are trying to incite the kind of action and fight necessary to push the arc of the moral universe towards justice.
TNH was founded as IRIN, in the ashes of Rwanda’s genocide. The theory of change was that more information, from the heart of crises, would move the international community to intervene. Almost 30 years later, we are drowning in information. Every single one of us with a phone has access to images of Gazan babies, Sudanese men and women being turned to football fields full of bloody rags and bone shards. We are watching whole universes and lineages being levelled. People are live-streaming their own genocides, while the journalists attempting to bear witness are being assassinated. At the same time, the absolute impunity afforded to some countries, and the perception of double standards and hypocrisy, is forcing a reckoning.
The urgency of providing rigorously fact-based context, facilitating shared storytelling and solution creation amongst and between affected populations, all with a focus on impact, clarifies the importance of TNH’s work. I am taking the time to learn more about TNH before evolving our strategy, but I can say that I look forward to being both more expansive and deliberate about partnering to find the right audiences to drive the impact that is at the heart of our mission.
In many ways, my life and career have been a journey into answering the question that WEB Dubois posed in Souls of Black Folks: “How does it feel to be a problem?” In Sara Ahmed’s book, after she describes how those pointing out injustice are turned into problems by those who are perpetuating the injustice or whose comfort is predicated upon injustice, she goes on to write that “we can change our relationship to becoming the problem – we can find, in it, a calling.”
Leaning back into this understanding of myself has brought me so much joy, so much purpose, and so much clarity. I have found, in shining the light on inequity, injustice, systems of power and harm, a calling. And that is why it is such a joy and a privilege to lead this incredible team that Heba Aly has built, and to be part of TNH’s next chapter.
A luta continua; vitória è certa.
Ebele Okobi, CEO