In this amazing piece we ran across on BusinessDay Nigeria, Olufunke Olufon writes about a tax that doesn’t appear in any budget, isn’t collected by revenue authorities, and is never debated in parliament. Yet we all pay it. Every day.
It’s called the trust deficit tax. And it’s quietly bankrupting Africa’s future.
THE COST NOBODY COUNTS
Imagine you’re trying to start a business. You’ve got the idea. You’ve got the skills. But investors don’t trust the regulatory system. So they charge you higher interest rates. They demand more paperwork. They take longer to say yes or just say no.
That extra cost? That’s the trust tax.
Funke explains that when citizens don’t trust government agencies, they skip vaccination drives and disease spreads faster. When investors don’t trust courts, they price risk higher and capital becomes expensive for everyone. When donors don’t trust local organizations, they layer on endless monitoring, slowing delivery and turning partnership into surveillance.
“A single broomstick cannot sweep the compound.” – Yoruba Proverb
But what happens when nobody trusts the person holding the broom?
HOW TRUST DEFICITS FORM
Here’s where the piece gets personal. She explains that trust doesn’t vanish overnight. It’s like a bank account. Every kept promise is a deposit. Every broken commitment is a withdrawal.
A government that only communicates during elections. A nonprofit that reports numbers but never stories. A company that talks purpose in annual reports but extraction in communities. These aren’t always acts of bad faith. Often, they’re organizations that never learned to treat communication as strategy instead of an afterthought.
The result? Institutions that are permanently reactive, permanently opaque, and permanently paying the trust tax through slower approvals, weaker partnerships, and impact that never compounds because too few people believe in it.
“The frog that jumps without looking where it lands will end up in the chicken’s mouth.” – West African Proverb
Africa has jumped. But if the landing zone is built on distrust, the fall is predictable.
THE INNOVATION PENALTY
This is the part that hit hardest. Funke writes that Africa isn’t short of ideas. It’s not short of talent. What it lacks is credibility infrastructure – the systems that allow good ideas to attract resources and scale.
She calls it the “innovation penalty”: the extra burden promising people carry simply because the institutions around them haven’t earned belief.
A Nigerian health tech startup with a brilliant solution still pays a premium if investors don’t trust the regulatory environment. More due diligence. More risk requirements. More time proving legitimacy instead of building products.
“When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” – Zulu Proverb
The moon is shining. But if nobody trusts the path, nobody walks.
WHAT LEADERS CAN DO
Olufunke doesn’t just diagnose the problem. She prescribes a cure. And it’s surprisingly simple:
1. Treat communication as a system, not an event.
Institutions that build credibility communicate continuously, sharing the truth of their work in language people can act on.
2. Close the gap between what you say and what you do.
Citizens and partners notice when messaging doesn’t match reality. Authentic voice is a leadership discipline before it’s a communications strategy.
3. Make trust measurable.
Organizations that track stakeholder trust formally catch erosion early, before it becomes a crisis.
“Well done is better than well said.” – African Proverb
Trust isn’t built in speeches. It’s built in kept promises.
The DNA take
In this amazing piece, Olufunke Olufon leaves us with a challenge that sticks: Africa has the talent. The ideas. The resources. But ideas don’t scale on their own. They scale on trust.
The organizations that will define Africa’s next decade won’t necessarily be the richest or the loudest. They’ll be the ones who decide to stop paying the trust tax and start building credibility, one honest interaction at a time.
“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” – African Proverb
The infrastructure of impact isn’t concrete or code. It’s kept promises. And that’s something anyone, at any age, can start building today.
Africa doesn’t need more brilliant ideas. It needs the trust that lets those ideas breathe.
The question isn’t whether we can build it. It’s probably “Are we willing to?”
Olufunke Olufon is a global communications leader, TEDxLagos speaker, and Founder of Iwà Consulting, a strategic communications firm working with governments, development institutions, and private sector organisations across Africa and the United States. Visit www.funkeolufon.com
