Every executive I speak with across Africa agrees that a crisis could strike their organisation. Far fewer can tell me what would happen in the first sixty minutes if it did: who speaks, what they say, on whose authority. That gap, between acknowledging risk and being ready for it, is where reputations are lost. And in today’s African information environment, it is widening at exactly the moment it can least afford to.
The arithmetic is simple. Research consistently attributes more than 60% of a company’s market value to its reputation. The thing that carries most of your value is also the thing that can be damaged the fastest. A reputation built over decades can now be destabilised in hours.
The new physics of a crisis are:
Speed: Crises now ignite in hours, usually on social media, before they reach headlines. Brands that respond within 48 hours are far more likely to retain trust; silence is perceived not as caution but as indifference. The gap between a story breaking and your response is filled by others, with speculation and, increasingly, fabrication.
Fabrication: The cost of a convincing lie has collapsed. Deepfake content rose roughly ninefold between 2023 and 2025, and across Africa, documented disinformation campaigns have surged nearly fourfold since 2022, with over 189 operations mapped. Increasingly, crises are not missteps an organisation makes. They are attacks manufactured against it.
