BAMIDELE JOHNSON
Ezra Olubi’s suspension from Paystack is more than a scandal. It is, to my mind, a stress test for a tech ecosystem that has grown faster than the guardrails meant to keep it chaste. When a founding executive is accused of sexual misconduct involving a subordinate and old tweets crawl out of the digital tombs with references verging on the X-rated, the instinct in some quarters is to wonder if this is an overreaction. It is not. Not by an inch.
Tech founders across the world tend to be treated like rare birds. Brilliant, eccentric and somewhat untouchable. But that mystique has collapsed before. Uber’s Travis Kalanick built an empire on swagger until revelations of harassment and toxic culture forced him out. In 2021 at Activision Blizzard, one of the worlds video game giants, reports of harassment, discrimination and a frat house culture of loud parties, alcohol, messy living and macho, anything-goes behaviour invited American public fury, state investigations and leadership shake-ups.
Even Google, a company allergic to mess, watched thousands of employees walk out in 2018 after it quietly paid off an executive accused of misconduct rather than confront the allegations. Paystack is now facing its own watershed moment. A company that became a symbol of African innovation after its acquisition by Stripe cannot shrug off a crisis at the top. This is not a blemish. It is an outright crisis of credibility. A workplace cannot be viewed as safe if those who hold the most power are allowed to behave without restraint.
The exhumed tweets alone would raise questions about judgment. Coupled with allegations involving a subordinate, they raise questions about the culture that enabled them, especially the casualness with which Olubi made them. The uncomfortable truth is that the African tech space is not exempt from the problems that have marked Silicon Valleys darker chapters. High growth can breed high impunity. Brilliant founders can become insulated from accountability while HR units struggle, or quietly choose not, to check the excesses of the people who built the house.
The real test lies ahead. Will Paystacks investigation be transparent and firm or will it dissolve into corporate whispering and time-buying? Will the industry treat this as something to learn from or an inconvenient headline to scroll past?
Across the world, tech companies have learned that workplace misconduct left unchallenged becomes culture by default. Paystack now has a chance to show that its innovation can walk side by side, hand in hand with accountability. It should take that chance boldly, if only to be sure its own closet is not chock-full with dinosaur-sized skeletons.