Most conversations about African tech infrastructure start with the same inventory: power, connectivity, payment rails, data centres. It is time for them to do more to include the layer that sits on top of all of it, which is the content, language and culture people actually use these systems to produce and consume. That gap is why as a Techie a you would not be remiss to put a book and arts festival in your event calendar this period.
From 29 to 31 October, the Ibadan Book and Arts Festival (IBAFEST) returns under the theme “The Stories We Long to Tell.” It is a hybrid event, with physical and virtual participation, spanning books, film, performance, visual art, workshops and exhibitions. On paper, it is a literary festival. In practice, it touches questions the tech sector keeps postponing.
Technology is already the IBAFEST 2026 plumbing
Start with the obvious. A hybrid festival is an infrastructure project. It needs streaming that holds up, registration and ticketing that work, and one audience in Ibadan alongside another watching from across Nigeria and even beyond. None of that is glamorous, and all of it is the kind of unglamorous engineering worth paying attention to. Cultural organisers across Nigeria are quietly building digital operations on tight budgets, and their lessons are useful to any founder shipping products under the same constraints.
The language question is a technology question
Among this year’s featured guests is Dr. Tunde Adegbola, a research scientist, consulting engineer and culture activist. Put him on a lineup with poets, screenwriters and curators and the logic becomes clear. Whether a language survives in digital spaces depends on whether anyone builds the tools for it: keyboards, speech recognition, translation, datasets. Yoruba, the language of the city hosting this festival, is a live example. Every team promising “AI for Africa” eventually collides with the fact that the data, and the cultural understanding behind it, has to come from somewhere. Writers, translators and poets such as Tade Ipadeola, also on the guest list, are among the people who hold that knowledge.
Stories are the product’s first draft
At Techies Node we are a platform that wants to tell Africa’s tech stories, because we know that the cornerstone of a robust tech ecosystem is storytelling. That is why we are interested in IBAFEST 2026
IBAFEST features the likes of Stephen Okonkwo, a screenwriter and director, and Wana Udobang, a writer, poet, performer and curator, work in forms that technology platforms have spent years reshaping: streaming, short video, audio, digital publishing. Builders who understand how stories travel make better products, because most products are, at bottom, a story about a problem and who it happens to.
Ibadan is not Lagos with a smaller budget
This deserves plain language. The dominant narrative of Nigerian tech is Lagos-centric, and it flattens everything outside it. Ibadan has its own institutions, its own rhythm and a cultural density that should be read on its own terms. IBAFEST’s 2025 edition was held at the International Conference Centre at the University of Ibadan, a reminder of how much of the city’s intellectual life sits close to its research base. An ecosystem grows from local talent, local audiences and local demand, and festivals are among the few places where all three share a room.
The value of a literary festival for a techie and a tech media platform is in adjacency: sitting among people whose work depends on attention, language and trust, which are the same inputs every consumer technology company says it wants and often handles badly.
Three reasons to be at IBAFEST 2026
First, product thinking. Spend three days around people who spend their working lives understanding audiences.
Second, language and data. If you build anything that touches text, voice or search, the people who work with these materials are your best reality check.
Third, ecosystem building. The festival’s Creative Economy Forum programme sits at the point where creative output meets digital distribution and revenue, and who builds the rails for that economy is still an open question.
So What’s the Catch?
Infrastructure decides what is possible. Culture decides what is worth building. A tech community that attends only tech events will keep rediscovering that second half the expensive way. IBAFEST 2026 offers a cheaper route: three days in Ibadan, hybrid for those who cannot travel, asking what stories we long to tell and, implicitly, what systems we need to tell them well.
Registration is open at the official IBAFEST registration page
