I rarely admit this, but I was nervous.
Not the performative kind of nervousness, but the quiet kind that settles in when you understand the weight of what you are holding.
By the time I walked onto the stage at Wharton to moderate a policy panel featuring global leaders across finance, diplomacy, technology governance, and media, I had already been carrying the conference for weeks.
As Vice President of Marketing and Communications for the Wharton Africa Business Conference, I wasn’t only preparing to moderate a conversation; I was responsible for the digital backbone and narrative coherence of the entire event. That meant overseeing the conference website, shaping how the conference showed up publicly, and managing how ideas, speakers, and themes travelled across LinkedIn and digital platforms in the weeks leading up to it.
Long before I stepped on stage, I had been thinking about audience, signal, credibility, and trust. And yet, nothing quite prepares you for the moment when preparation meets presence. Because moderating this panel was different.
This wasn’t a symbolic discussion. The people seated beside me were not commentators or theorists. They were practitioners, individuals whose careers spanned decades of institutional leadership, diplomatic negotiation, policy design, capital allocation, and global advocacy.
In that moment, one thought kept returning: This is not a space for cleverness. This is a space for precision.
What most people don’t see is the labor that precedes a serious policy conversation. Preparing this panel required weeks of research, calibration, and framing not just because of the topic, but because of the magnitude of the panelists themselves. Each had spent years shaping systems that outlast headlines: multilateral financial institutions, sovereign diplomacy, AI governance conversations, humanitarian policy, fiscal reform, and global media narratives.
My responsibility was not to showcase them; their work already speaks for itself. It was to design a conversation worthy of their experience.
That meant:
- understanding each panelist’s institutional history and current priorities
- crafting questions that could hold complexity without flattening it
- and ensuring the conversation didn’t collapse into abstraction or performance
All of this while simultaneously holding responsibility for how the conference itself was being perceived globally, through digital communications, LinkedIn engagement, and the broader narrative architecture of the event.
By the time I sat down on stage, the nerves were real, not because I doubted my voice, but because I understood the responsibility of stewardship.
One of the panelists had spent over three decades inside one of the world’s most powerful multilateral financial institutions, overseeing billions of dollars in development finance and advising governments navigating fragile political economies. Another represented a state actively shaping conversations on digital public infrastructure and AI governance, an arena where standards are being written faster than laws can keep up.
Another worked at the intersection of humanitarian crises and global advocacy, translating lived experience into policy relevance on some of the world’s most influential stages. Another brought the grounded realism of public finance and fiscal governance, the kind of work that determines whether sovereignty is symbolic or sustained. Another shaped narratives that influence how legitimacy, credibility, and power are perceived globally.
What struck me was not the diversity of sectors but the consistency of discipline. None of them spoke in absolutes. None of them reached for spectacles. None of them framed agency as rebellion.
Instead, the agency showed up as:
- institutional fluency
- patience built over years
- and restraint earned through responsibility
In a geopolitical environment increasingly defined by fragmentation, shifting alliances, contested norms, and uneven power, this kind of agency matters more than ever.
At one point during the discussion, I caught myself slowing the pace, deliberately. Not because time was running out, but because the room needed space to sit with complexity. As a moderator, my role wasn’t to extract soundbites. It was to protect coherence to ensure finance could speak to culture, technology could speak to ethics, and moral urgency didn’t outrun institutional reality. Watching the panellists respond, building on one another’s insights across disciplines reinforced a hard truth:
Excellence is not charisma. It is the ability to remain rigorous when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
In a world that rewards speed, visibility, and certainty, excellence has become rare and therefore powerful. The leaders beside me had built careers not on immediacy, but on credibility. Not on dominance, but on durability.
Looking back, what stayed with me was how clearly the lesson stretched beyond that room. Listening to Dr Mercy Tembon draw from decades inside the World Bank shaping institutional governance, fiduciary oversight, and multilateral credibility, it became clear that agency, for nations, is built patiently through institutional capacity, not rhetorical ambition. Hearing Mr Arthur Asiimwe speak from the frontlines of diplomacy and digital governance, where standards for AI and public infrastructure are being negotiated in real time, reinforced that influence endures only when it is embedded in rules, not slogans. Ms Emtithal Mahmoud‘s work, spanning humanitarian advocacy in Darfur to global policy forums, showed that voice carries moral weight only when it is disciplined enough to translate lived experience into sustained global attention. Ms Chisom Okechukwu, grounded in the realities of public finance and fiscal reform, reminded us that sovereignty without competence is symbolic at best, while Ms Temi Ibirogba‘s work in global media and the creative economy made clear that narrative power, when exercised with rigor, shapes legitimacy long before policy catches up.
Moderating that panel didn’t leave me feeling powerful; it left me feeling responsible; responsible for the questions I frame, the systems I help design, and the spaces I hold. In a geopolitical moment saturated with noise, the clearest form of agency belongs to those willing to commit to the quiet, demanding discipline of excellence long before the spotlight ever arrives.