Stop Calling This Opinion, It’s a Scripted Hit Piece

There’s a particular kind of desperation in attacking the people who built the house you’re still living in. Not competing with them. Not outgrowing them. Just trying to smear the foundations and hoping the roof somehow stays up. That’s the vibe of a planted opinion piece that ran on April 14, 2026, on a site called Current Issues Online, under the byline “Felicia Opoku,” taking aim at network marketing leaders Dev Johl, David Sharma, and Adly Hassan.

Let’s be clear about what this is really about. It isn’t a serious critique of industry practice. It isn’t an argument with receipts. It’s narrative warfare, the cheap kind, where a publication with no real standing in the network marketing beat suddenly discovers the language of corporate governance and decides, with theatrical seriousness, that a few of Africa’s most recognizable field leaders should be taken down a peg. The timing’s the tell, too, arriving days after widely noted momentum around a rival ecosystem and its rising profile, as if a familiar institutional playbook kicked in the moment someone else’s headlines got too bright.

One paragraph of background, because it matters and then we can move on. The Current Issues Online piece makes financial and professional conduct claims about named individuals, while offering no named sources, no documentary evidence, and no indication the targets were contacted for comment. It also appears to lean heavily on media-driven insinuation and critical public narratives, then sprinkles in the kind of corporate vocabulary that sounds impressive until you realize it’s floating free of reporting.

Now, the adult question: what do you do with a text that names real people, describes their supposed failings with a straight face, but can’t do the one thing journalism is built on, showing the reader how you know what you claim to know?

You don’t debate it like it’s a good-faith argument. You don’t grant it the dignity of a point-by-point refutation, because there’s nothing to refute. There’s only the void where sourcing should be. You call it what it is, a hit piece in the shape of an opinion column.

Start with the simplest moral anchor, the one that every editor understands and every reader deserves: right of reply. If you’re going to attach damaging claims to identifiable individuals, you contact them. You give them the chance to answer. You test your own certainty against their version of events, even if you don’t like them, even if you think they’ll dodge. Current Issues Online didn’t do that here. That’s not a minor procedural hiccup. That’s the difference between journalism and a drive-by.

And then there’s the weirdness of the byline. “Felicia Opoku” is presented as the author of a piece whose sophistication and terminology sit in jarring contrast to the rest of the platform’s output. Read around the site and you don’t find a track record that screams seasoned corporate governance hand or network marketing specialist. Then, suddenly, you get a cleanly structured, rhetorically polished broadside that lands with the precision of institutional messaging. The more interesting question becomes who actually wrote it, and why this particular outlet agreed to run it.

The text itself carries the hallmarks of content that may have been drafted, at least in part, with AI tools, not because machines are magical, but because they’re useful at producing smooth, plausible prose without the nuisance of human texture. Real reporting is messy. It has names, dates, phone calls that don’t get returned, documents you can describe, quotes that complicate your thesis. This thing is the opposite: sterile confidence, immaculate paragraphs, emotionally calibrated phrasing, and a conspicuous absence of the granular detail that comes from someone who did the work. That’s an observation, not a courtroom charge. But readers aren’t stupid, and neither are the people who push this stuff.

What makes the attack especially absurd is the target selection. Dev Johl, David Sharma, and Adly Hassan aren’t famous because an anonymous column decided they are. Their public standing isn’t a PR mirage that can be punctured by a few paragraphs of insinuation. Their legacy is visible, measurable, and stubbornly human, thousands of network marketing leaders across Africa who trace their development to training rooms, mentorship, and years of field-building. That’s the part the hit piece can’t metabolize. You can’t anonymous-source your way out of a legacy.

Notice, too, the cheap rhetorical move at the center of the piece: the casual dismissal that these men’s reputations “exceeded reality.” That’s the kind of line you write when you don’t have evidence but you want to leave a smudge anyway. It’s character assassination with plausible deniability, the columnist’s version of shrugging and saying, “People are saying.” People are always saying. The job is to prove.

The silence from the named leaders has been treated, in some corners of online discourse, as a vacuum begging to be filled. It isn’t. Sometimes silence is just dignity. Sometimes it’s the posture of people who’ve spent decades building real networks and don’t feel obligated to spar with anonymous institutional whispers. If you’ve trained thousands, if your work walks around in other people’s careers, you don’t chase every shadow on every minor platform.

Here’s the part institutions never seem to learn: these campaigns are strategically self-destructive. The networks being targeted are the networks the attackers still depend on, the same scaffolding that made today’s business possible. When you fire at the builders, you announce you’ve run out of confidence in your own construction.

So no, I’m not moved by the theatrical seriousness of a piece that can’t meet basic standards. I’m moved by something else, the stubborn continuity of a real reputation in a field that’s brutally good at sniffing out who actually shows up. The greatest tribute to Dev Johl, David Sharma, and Adly Hassan won’t be any column written in their defense. It’ll be the thousands of leaders across Africa who already know who built them, and who will make their choices accordingly.