The real cost of building on borrowed land

In 2009 and 2010, I understood something that would take most people another decade to learn.

I had started on Facebook — drawn, like everyone else, by the access, the reach, the extraordinary ease of finding and building an audience in a place where the audience already was. And then fairly quickly, I recognised something that gave me pause. I did not own any of it. The content was mine. The relationships were mine. But the infrastructure — the platform, the data, the audience relationship itself — belonged entirely to Facebook. If they changed the algorithm, I lost my reach. If they suspended the account, I lost access. If they shut down, I would lose everything I had built there, overnight, with no recourse.

So in 2010 I built something I did own. A blog. An email database. A newsletter that went out through udookonjo.com – at a time when almost nobody in my professional circle was thinking this way. I was building my own digital infrastructure when most people were still figuring out how to use social media. The database grew. The newsletters went out. The asset was mine.

And then social media happened — properly, powerfully, inescapably — and I did what many people who know better do when faced with something that works brilliantly in the short term. I got distracted by the quick wins.

The seduction of borrowed land

Let me be honest about this, because the honest version is more useful than the cautionary tale.

I did not abandon what I knew because I forgot it. I deprioritised it because Instagram was working. The reach was real. The business was coming in. The audience was growing at a scale and speed that my newsletter database could not match. The logic of being where the audience is is not irrational — it is how digital businesses are built in a platform economy. The decision to invest heavily in Instagram and Facebook made sense by every short-term metric available.

This is the seduction of borrowed land. It is not that leaders do not understand the risk. Most do, in the abstract. It is that the returns on rented infrastructure are so immediate, so visible, and so compelling that the long-term ownership argument gets deferred. Not rejected — deferred. Until the morning, the deferral has a cost.

For me, that morning came when both my Instagram and Facebook accounts were suspended towards the end of May. Close to two hundred thousand followers across both platforms – over a hundred thousand on Instagram, seventy-seven thousand on Facebook, plus associated accounts built over the years. Original content. Genuine relationships. A professional presence that people – coaching clients, real estate prospects, and women who had been following my work for a decade – accessed through those platforms.

The real cost of losing your base

I know this not only as a principle but also as a recent and specific reality.

I want to be honest about the cost, because minimising it would be dishonest.

A friend at a dinner in Zanzibar this week tried to show my work to others in the room. She searched. She could not find my accounts. She found, instead, features about me on third-party pages — other people’s content referencing mine. That moment, small as it sounds, captures something significant. In a world that is increasingly connected, in a season when I am actively building cross-continental relationships and expanding into new markets, the inability for someone to search for me and find me directly is not a minor inconvenience. It is a gap in the architecture of my professional presence.

There is a psychological cost to this that I will not pretend does not exist. Years of effort, original thinking, and genuine community building are suddenly inaccessible to the people who were following it and to the people who might have discovered it. Several people have reached out to check whether everything is well. That itself tells you something — that the absence of a presence that had been consistent for years registers as something worth noticing.

There is also an economic cost. My work generates business — real estate enquiries, coaching conversations, invitations to speak, and collaborations across Africa. A significant portion of that pipeline begins with someone finding me online, following my work over time, and eventually reaching out. That pipeline does not disappear overnight when an account is suspended. But it is interrupted. And interrupted pipelines in a cross-continental building season have a cost I would be disingenuous to ignore.

I have reported the matter formally to Meta Africa. The response, at the time of writing, is pending. I am not raising this to litigate publicly. I am raising it because I know — with certainty — that I am not alone. Prominent, verified, commercially active professionals across Africa are experiencing the same thing, some waiting months for reinstatement, some never getting it at all. A system that can arbitrarily remove someone’s verified, legitimate professional presence — without adequate recourse, without a clear timeline, without proportionate accountability — is a system with a structural problem. Naming that problem is not a grievance. It is governance.

What the foundation made possible

Here is what the suspension did not take: the database. The newsletters. udookonjo.com. The email list I built fifteen years ago when almost nobody was thinking about owned digital infrastructure.

When the accounts went down, I went back to what I had always owned. The foundation had survived the years of relative neglect precisely because I had built it on ground that belonged to me. Nobody could suspend my email list. Nobody could restrict access to my newsletter. No algorithm decided who received it.

I was not discovering a lesson. I was being recalled to one I had learnt early and allowed the lure of social media to quietly pull my attention away. The response was not panic. It was inventory — a clear-eyed accounting of what existed, what needed to be rebuilt, and what this moment was really asking of me.

The Blueprint™ on Substack is live. The newsletter database is being rebuilt with fresh intention. The owned platforms are being treated with the seriousness they have always deserved. This is what a season of suspension makes possible — not just a return to what you had, but a more deliberate version of it.

What you actually own

Let me be specific, because vague is expensive.

You own your email list, provided it sits on a platform with full export rights and the data belongs to you. You own your website and its content, provided the domain and hosting are in your name, under your control, and your payment details are correct. You own your intellectual property: your frameworks, your named concepts, your manuscripts, and your methodologies – provided you have documented creation and protected what is protectable. You own your newsletter community — because the subscriber relationship exists independently of any single platform’s algorithm or suspension notice.

The principle is simple. If the platform closed tomorrow and you lost everything on it, what would remain? That remainder is what you own. Build it with the same deliberateness you would bring to acquiring property.

The wealth that no Algorithm controls

This is ultimately a leadership conversation — about how every professional building in the digital economy thinks about the difference between access and ownership, between borrowed reach and built equity.

I sat at dinner this week in Zanzibar with thirty Zimbabweans, Zambians, and South Africans. Not followers. Friends — built over years of genuine investment in human beings rather than platform metrics. On Friday I will sit in Nairobi with a dozen women at a wealth table. On June 6th, the Radiant Collective Capital community gathered for a Wealth Shift convening. Recently, forty women in the Power Woman African Mastermind met to think, build, and challenge each other.

None of these rooms are algorithm-defined. None of them can be suspended. None of them depend on Meta’s response timeline for their existence.

Relationship wealth — the specific, irreplaceable human capital of people who know you, trust you, and would find you again regardless of what platform you were on — is the highest form of ownership in the digital economy. It cannot be built by posting consistently. It is built in rooms, physical and virtual, where real things happen between real people.

I want my Instagram back. I have made the investments. I have earned the following. And I intend to pursue every legitimate avenue available to restore what was built. But I will not rebuild on a foundation of borrowed land alone. The season of suspension clarified something I already knew: the work that matters most cannot be held hostage to a platform’s response timeline.

Build what you own. Guard what you own. And in the rooms where no algorithm can reach — that is where you will find the wealth that lasts.

For now: audit what you actually own. Not what you have built on someone else’s platform — what exists independently of any platform’s permission. Email list. Newsletter. Website. IP. Community. That inventory is your real digital balance sheet. Start building it like you mean it — because you do.

Udo Okonjo is CEO of Fine & Country West Africa and founder of Radiant Collective Capital. She has been building infrastructure for women in leadership and wealth since 2010.