Why I Believe Obaigbena Named His Social Media Platform LekeeLekee

When Nduka Obaigbena introduced LekeeLekee, many people understandably focused on what the new platform promised to become. It was presented as an African-built social media platform created to connect African voices with the world and challenge the dominance of foreign technology companies in content distribution. But beyond its ambition and features, I became interested in a simpler question: Why did Obaigbena call it LekeeLekee?The answer may be hidden in a story from the beginning of his journalism career. Long before THISDAY, ARISE News and the global media events associated with his name, Obaigbena was a university student drawing cartoons for a Nigerian newspaper. At that stage, Lekeleke was not a technology company or social media platform; it was the name of his cartoon column.The first LekelekeIn a 2019 interview with THISDAY, Obaigbena recalled leaving Government College Ughelli in 1977 and beginning work as a cartoonist for the Nigerian Observer. By then, he was studying at the University of Benin, but he regularly left the university to draw and submit cartoons to the newspaper. His column was called Lekeleke.The newspaper paid him ₦10 for each cartoon, and he produced one every day. The money accumulated until he was able to buy his first car while still a university student. In other words, Lekeleke was not merely a name printed above a newspaper cartoon; it was the first media identity that produced a visible reward for his creativity.That detail is important because people often remember their first success differently from their biggest success. The world may remember THISDAY and ARISE News as Obaigbena’s defining institutions, but he may remember Lekeleke as one of the places where the journey truly began. It was proof, at a young age, that an idea drawn on paper could attract an audience, earn an income and change the life of its creator.What Lekeleke meansLekeleke is a familiar Nigerian name for the cattle egret, the slender white bird commonly seen around farms, open fields and grazing animals. For many Nigerians, particularly those who grew up in the South-west, the bird is also connected to childhood songs and memories. It is therefore a name that sounds local, familiar and unmistakably African.The bird also offers an interesting metaphor for a social platform. It moves freely, travels across open spaces and is easily recognised wherever it appears. A platform that wants African stories and voices to travel beyond geographical boundaries could hardly find a more culturally grounded image.There is, however, no public statement I found in which Obaigbena categorically explains that the social media platform was named after his old cartoon column. This connection should therefore be presented as an informed interpretation, not an established fact. Still, the similarity of the names, their association with the same founder and the personal importance of the original column make the connection difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence.From a newspaper column to a digital communityNearly five decades separate the Lekeleke cartoon column from the LekeeLekee social platform. The first belonged to an era of paper, ink and daily trips from the University of Benin to a newspaper office. The second belongs to an age of smartphones, algorithms and conversations that travel across borders within seconds.Yet the two ideas appear to be connected by the same belief: that Africans should have spaces through which they can express themselves. The young Obaigbena used cartoons to communicate ideas to newspaper readers. The older Obaigbena is now building a platform where millions of people can publish their own words, photographs and videos.The difference is largely one of scale. The old Lekeleke carried the voice of one young cartoonist to readers of the Nigerian Observer. The new LekeeLekee seeks to carry the voices of an entire continent into the global digital conversation.Why I believe the name returnedI believe Obaigbena chose LekeeLekee because the name represents his beginning. It takes him back to the period when his creativity first became commercially valuable and when media gave him his earliest sense of independence. Buying his first car from the earnings of that column must have made the name difficult to forget.Naming the platform LekeeLekee may therefore be more than an exercise in branding. It may be an act of return: a successful media entrepreneur going back to the name under which he first discovered what content could do. What began as a cartoon column earning ₦10 per drawing has returned as an African social media platform with global ambitions.The spelling has changed from the Lekeleke recorded in the 2019 interview to the stylised LekeeLekee used by the platform. But the history behind the name appears to remain visible. It connects Obaigbena’s earliest experiment in media with what may become his most ambitious digital experiment.Perhaps that is the real story of LekeeLekee. It is not merely the name of a new application competing for space on our phones. It may be the rebirth of the name that bought a young university student his first car—and showed him that African creativity could travel, attract value and build something bigger than its creator first imagined.The historical account of the cartoon column comes from Obaigbena’s 2019 interview with THISDAY.