The Unforgiving Server: Ezra Olubi, Paystack, and the Price of a Searchable Past
The suspension and eventual sacking of Ezra Olubi from Paystack, a company where he was Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, over resurfaced tweets from a decade ago, is not surprising. If you understand social media and its affordances, then you know this is predestined reckoning. What we have just witnessed is the inevitable clash between the ephemeral, edgy “cruise” of the early Nigerian Twitter and the permanent, high-stakes record demanded of leaders in the global digital economy. As always, I have to state from the outset, I have no interest in interrogating the specific content of those old tweets. People have already done that as we have seen in two camps – of outrage and defence. Instead, I am more interested in the implication of the digital memory, the evolving moral economy of our online lives, and the impossible burden of maintaining a consistent identity across a decade of profound personal and professional change.
Until his fall from grace, Ezra Olubi was a certified icon of the Nigerian tech ecosystem. As co-founder of Paystack, his was one of the faces of a rare success story – a young man fronting a local startup that attracted global acquisition and became a beacon of possibility. It is why I find his fall all the more dramatic. The old tweets, said to contain homophobic and other inflammatory language, created a storm that eventually forced Paystack to act. The statement from the company’s spokesperson was a classic example in corporate crisis communication: “These comments are unacceptable and inconsistent with our values… Ezra is currently not involved with the running of Paystack…” The swiftness of the action was as telling as the action itself.
To understand the fury, you have to understand context collapse, a concept from digital sociology, which describes how social media flattens multiple audiences into a single context. Olubi’s tweets, possibly made for a small, closed group of most likely like-minded audience on the edgy, informal platform that was Nigerian Twitter in the early 2010s, were never intended for the audience of 2025. While it might not have mattered when he was tweeting them, today’s audience of a global workforce, international investors, LGBTQ+ colleagues, and a diverse user base dramatically changes the context. Combined, this mixed audience have dragged a “backstage” performance onto the “front stage” of Olubi’s professional life. In effect, he was dragged before a jury that did not exist when the crime was committed, but which must judge him regardless.
Expectedly, this fall from grace has elicited a familiar social media reaction, revealing a nation deeply conflicted. On one side were those demanding accountability. For this group, power necessitates responsibility. If you are an Exec in a place like Paystack, attracting foreign investment the way that company is doing, you have to submit yourself to higher standards, they seem to argue. For this set of people, past rhetoric or bigotry expressed even while at the entry-level of a career would signal major character flaws that should have been flagged much earlier. The other side of the arguments I have seen online appears more forgiving; some of them framing the anger at the resurfaced tweet as witch-hunting a successful young man, who probably was tweeting for clout. They seem to believe that human fallibility and personal evolution should be permissible for talented young men. From what I see online, both sides may differ in their reactions but they both say the same thing – the Internet does not forget.
It’s s phrase we have used casually but it’s deep but its mechanics are worth examining. The internet doesn’t forget because of the fundamental architecture of networked publics, a concept scholar Dana Boyd brilliantly breaks down into four key properties. Olubi’s case is a textbook illustration of each. First, online expressions are persistent; they are automatically recorded and archived. Spoken words tend to have a limited shelf life but digital contents like a tweet, lasts longer because it is a piece of data that is lodged on a server. Second, digital content is replicable; meaning it can be duplicated perfectly. Note the fact that screenshots of those tweets have been saved and are being shared online, whether or not the originals were deleted. Third, this content is scalable; its visibility going ‘out of control’ once people became interested in it. So, what might have been created for a small, closed group has the potential to ‘go viral’ ten years down the line, producing unintended consequences. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, it is searchable. Digital content of this type – in networked publics – can be accessed through search, allowing anyone to uncover inappropriate pieces of content produced and shared in moments of impropriety.
Olubi’s past became exactly that – a “digital ghost,” an archived, decontextualised version of his former self, empowered by persistence, replication, scalability, and searchability, that could be summoned at any moment to haunt his present success. This saga underscores the complete erosion of the line between public and private life for those in the digital spotlight. Using the sociological lens of dramaturgy, we can see life as a performance with a “front stage” for the public and a “back stage” for private moments. For a founder like Olubi, the “founder as brand” model means the front stage has completely consumed the back stage. His personal identity is inextricably linked to Paystack’s corporate identity, its valuation, and its reputation. There is no longer a “private” Twitter account for a figure of his stature; every digital utterance, past or present, is a corporate communication.
The hard lessons from this are stark, and they extend far beyond a single individual. For individuals, especially ambitious young professionals, the lesson is the non-negotiable need for digital prudence. The idea that one can be reckless online and then clean up their act upon achieving success is dangerously obsolete. Your digital footprint is your permanent CV. The first step towards any position of leadership in the 21st century must be a rigorous, pre-emptive audit of your own digital history. Assume everything will be found.
For companies and startups, this is a glaring lesson in “skeleton-in-the-closet” due diligence. In an ecosystem where a founder’s story is a core asset, investors and boards can no longer afford to ignore the digital pasts of their key figures. A crisis management plan is useless if it is drafted after the damning tweets have already gone viral. Proactive investigation and preparation are now as crucial as financial audits.
Yet, the most profound challenge is for society itself. The Olubi incident forces us to confront our own role in this ecosystem of digital shame. The social media backlash, often dismissed as “cancel culture,” can also be seen as a form of decentralised social regulation – a way for the public to enforce new, more progressive norms where formal institutions are slow to act. However, a warning – this imperfect model forces the question: How do we collectively define a genuine the digital age? Do we forgive once tweets are deleted? Does the cancel culture permit growth and forgiveness, or does it merely enforce a phantom kind of digital puritanism through permanent punishment? When does accountability become a futile attempt to judge the past by the standards of the present?
In the final analysis, the forced exit of Ezra Olubi is a canonical case study for Nigeria’s digital coming of age. It is timely alert that the journey from anonymous netizen to public figure is a one-way street. Once on this track, it is near impossible to retreat but as you make progress, you go with the dispiriting feeling that it is with the shadow of your digital past following closely behind. Just one fear though. Is there a chance that as digital ecosystem evolves, we can build a system that does not just ‘delete’ flawed individuals but is able to hold people accountable without ruling out the opportunity to change. As a people we have to find a way to use the unforgiving, permanent memory of the server to ensure that young men with ‘dark minds’ get help early before they have the chance to destroy themselves and others around them. And that is because we agree that in the searchable past, we all have something to lose.
