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A Ugandan entrepreneur’s quiet assembly of a Pan-African creative group raises a more fundamental question.
As GEOFREY SERUGO wonders, is East Africa finally building the infrastructure its creative economy deserves?
There is a particular kind of ambition that accumulates and methodically, over years of building businesses that work, then asks a bigger question: what would it look like if all of this were connected?
That is, in essence, the story behind Live54+, the Pan-African creative group that officially launched this week with Julius Kyazze as its chief executive. The group brings together a network of creative, media, entertainment and experiential businesses across multiple African markets, with a coordination hub in Nairobi and planned active operations spanning Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Burundi.
Strategic offices in Dubai and Mauritius complete the architecture. The name is not accidental. Africa has 54 countries. The ambition is continental.
THE STRUCTURE, NOT THE PERSONALITY
It would be easy and wrong to read this launch as a personal milestone story. Kyazze is already well known within East Africa’s creative industry. He built Swangz Avenue into one of the most recognisable talent management and music production outfits on the continent.
He expanded into experiential marketing through Buzz Group Africa, into youth-focused broadcasting through NRG and Play Radio, and into brand strategy through The Kolective. Each of those businesses has earned its own standing. Live54+ is something different.
It is not a rebranding of those entities, and it is not a holding company in the traditional sense. It is, according to its own positioning, an ecosystem a group structure designed to enable those businesses to collaborate across borders, share infrastructure, and collectively serve clients and audiences at a scale that no single entity could manage alone.
What Live54+ is attempting if it executes is to build that connective tissue into a formal group structure.
WHY THIS, WHY NOW
The timing is not arbitrary. East Africa’s intra-regional trade has expanded sharply. Total merchandise trade within the East African Community reached roughly USD 38.2 billion in the second quarter of 2025 alone, a jump of 28.4 per cent compared to the same period in 2024.
Goods, money and people are moving faster across borders than at any point in the region’s history. The question is whether ideas, content and creative services can move with the same fluency.
Africa’s creative economy presents a compelling case for why they should. The continent’s music, film, fashion and digital content industries are among the fastest-growing economic segments on the continent.
Markets that were once fragmented and undervalued are now attracting serious attention from global streaming platforms, advertising groups and private equity investors. The infrastructure to capture that value, however, the agencies, the management companies, the production houses with genuine cross-border reach, remains thin.
WHAT THE MODEL MEANS FOR BRANDS
From a commercial standpoint, the Live54+ proposition is straightforward and worth taking seriously.
Multinational brands operating across East and West Africa have long faced a frustrating reality: to run an integrated campaign across Uganda, Kenya and Ghana, they must typically engage separate agencies in each market, navigate inconsistent creative standards, and manage fragmented reporting. The cost is not just financial. It is the cost of diluted creative coherence across markets.
THE TEST WILL BE EXECUTION
Scepticism is warranted. The history of Pan-African business ambitions is littered with announcements that outpaced their operational capacity.
Building a genuinely integrated group across six or more markets requires not just shared branding but shared systems, shared financial infrastructure, and the kind of management depth that takes years to develop.
Kyazze brings 20 years of track record to that challenge. The businesses within the group are established entities, not paper ventures. The offices in Dubai and Mauritius suggest a structure built for international capital and client relationships, not just regional optics.
Whether Live54+ becomes the Pan-African creative group it intends to be will be answered not by this launch, but by what it delivers in the next three years. But the architecture being assembled here is serious. That, at minimum, deserves serious attention.
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