In June 2025, Afreximbank’s venture arm signed a term sheet for an equity stake in D’Banj’s creator platform, C.R.E.A.M. Nigerian trade press covered the signing that same week as a done deal. Afreximbank’s own written account, published a month later, called it a term sheet “subject to the satisfactory completion of due diligence and final board approval.” Sixteen months on, no source on either side of that gap has said what closed, for how much, or whether it closed at all.
The investor is CANEX Creations Inc. (CCInc), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fund for Export Development in Africa, itself the equity investment arm of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). The target is D’Kings Men Media Ltd, the Lagos company run by Nigerian musician D’Banj (Daniel Oladapo Oyebanjo) that operates C.R.E.A.M., short for Creative, Reality, Entertainment, Arts and Music, a talent-discovery and monetisation platform reporting over seven million subscribers in Nigeria, reachable by app, web and the USSD code *463# on MTN.
What was actually signed#
The signing happened on the sidelines of Afreximbank’s 32nd Annual Meetings (AAM2025) in Abuja, with Osahon Akpata, head of CCInc, and D’Banj, as CEO of D’Kings Men Media Ltd, putting names to a document. AAM2025 ran from 25 to 28 June 2025 and drew an estimated 8,000 participants, including heads of state. Vanguard and BusinessDay both filed reports the same week, dated 28 June 2025, describing the signing in the past tense as a finished transaction: Afreximbank, through CANEX, had “sealed a partnership deal” and “acquired equity in the platform owned by D’banj.” The two reports read almost identically to each other, down to the phrasing, which suggests they trace back to a common source rather than two separately reported accounts.
Afreximbank’s own newsroom did not publish anything on the signing until 25 July 2025, almost a month later. That release uses a different verb tense entirely. It says Afreximbank, “acting through CANEX Creations Inc., has signed a term sheet for an equity investment” in C.R.E.A.M., and that “the prospective transaction is subject to the satisfactory completion of due diligence and final board approval.” A term sheet is a statement of intent to do a deal on agreed terms. It is not the deal itself, and both the Nigerian trade outlet The Condia (30 July 2025) and The Highstreet Journal (26 July 2025) independently used the same conditional framing in their own write-ups that week, each noting the due-diligence and board-approval condition in close to Afreximbank’s own words.
A gap between the ceremony and the paperwork#
The contradiction is not subtle once the dates are lined up. The outlets that called it done, Vanguard and BusinessDay, published in the same week as the ceremony itself, before Afreximbank had said anything in writing. The outlets that called it conditional, Afreximbank’s own newsroom, The Condia and The Highstreet Journal, all published roughly a month later, after the bank had time to characterise the transaction on its own terms. Read one way, the Nigerian press got ahead of a signing ceremony that photographed well and assumed a handshake meant a closing. Read the other way, Afreximbank’s own month-later language, repeated independently by two trade outlets, is the more considered account of what was actually signed, and “acquired equity” was premature from the start.
Neither reading can be confirmed from what is publicly available. No source, including Afreximbank’s, states a stake percentage, a valuation, or a price. No source gives a closing date. A 20 November 2025 AllAfrica story about an unrelated D’Banj and UN youth initiative mentions in passing that “Afreximbank acquired an equity stake” in C.R.E.A.M, but offers no new reporting, no source, and no indication the writer checked anything beyond repeating the earlier framing. It does not settle the question; it just repeats one side of it without saying why.
What Afreximbank has said about it since: nothing#
The clearest signal available is what Afreximbank has not said. CCInc has disclosed two other public investments since the D’Kings Men term sheet: a stake in the feature film Clarissa, announced by Afreximbank’s own newsroom with cast, director and co-financier names in February 2026, and an undisclosed, roughly 230-song Afrobeats publishing catalogue that CEO Osahon Akpata described, without naming it, in two interviews in 2026. Both disclosures came from Afreximbank or its chief executive talking about the fund’s portfolio in detail. Neither mentions D’Kings Men Media Ltd, D’Banj, or C.R.E.A.M. Afreximbank’s newsroom also put out a release in July 2026 announcing a separate CANEX creator competition for musicians, video makers and game developers, built with the Ethiopian tech firm Gebeya. That release, too, says nothing about the platform it reportedly took an equity stake in a year earlier.
An institution willing to name its film investments by title, cast and financing partner has gone quiet on this one. That silence does not prove the deal collapsed. A term sheet can also simply take a long time to close, or close without a press release, particularly for a transaction this small relative to Afreximbank’s balance sheet. But it does mean nobody outside the two parties has confirmed, in the sixteen months since the signing ceremony, that due diligence finished, that the board approved it, or that money or shares actually changed hands.
What this means for artists#
Three things are worth taking from a platform owner’s perspective, not just a journalist’s.
A signing ceremony is not a closing. Photographs of two executives holding a signed document make for a strong announcement, and Afreximbank’s own release includes exactly that image. But “signed a term sheet” and “closed an investment” describe different legal moments, days or months apart, with a lot that can still go wrong (or simply take time) in between: due diligence, board sign-off, final valuation. If you are negotiating with an institutional investor, understand which moment your own announcement, or anyone else’s coverage of it, is actually describing.
Local press covering your deal does not make it official. D’Banj’s team, and D’Kings Men Media Ltd as a company, do not appear to have issued their own statement distinguishing the “term sheet” framing from the “acquired equity” framing in the weeks the two versions ran side by side. When trade coverage of your own capital raise splits into two incompatible accounts, correcting the record publicly protects you more than it protects the investor, because you are the one who will be asked for updates by other partners, lenders or collaborators relying on that reporting.
An equity stake in your company is not a rights deal for your catalogue. Nothing in any source checked here describes CCInc’s position as touching D’Banj’s own music copyrights, C.R.E.A.M.’s content library, or any creator’s rights on the platform. It is described, consistently, as equity in D’Kings Men Media Ltd, the operating company. Creators using C.R.E.A.M. should not assume an investor taking a stake in the platform’s parent company has any claim on, or relationship to, the music rights of anyone using it.
Limits of this record#
No source checked states a stake percentage, an investment amount, a valuation, or a closing date for this transaction. No primary source, Afreximbank’s own or otherwise, has published anything reaffirming or denying a closing since the 25 July 2025 term-sheet release. The AllAfrica reference from November 2025 is treated here as a passing, uncorroborated repetition of the “acquired” framing, not as independent confirmation. No filing with Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission was checked, because the commission has no public search interface available to this desk; the company’s own registration and any associated capital change were not independently verified. Neither D’Banj nor D’Kings Men Media Ltd has published a statement, found by this desk, that resolves which account, the ceremony-week reporting or Afreximbank’s own month-later release, more accurately describes the current state of the transaction. This record will be updated if either party issues one.
This is a separate transaction from CCInc’s other disclosed music investment, an unnamed, roughly 230-song Afrobeats publishing catalogue administered by Sony Music Publishing, which has its own record on this site. The two should not be read as corroborating each other; they involve different counterparties and different kinds of rights entirely.
