The world has continued to marvel at how
Nigerians “manufacture” and “fabricate” scores of movies in a week.
It is reported that but for India, Nigeria produces more movies in
quantitative terms than any other country in the world. As joint
stakeholders in the development of our motherland, I
hope that my presentation today on the “social economics” of the
movie industry will provoke processes that could move the industry
forward. In the course of this presentation, I will be inviting you
to join me as we journey through the past, the present and the
future of the Nigerian film industry. There is a saying that today
is tomorrow’s yesterday, in other words, where we are today is a
reflection of our past and a foreshadow of our future.
The size of our population and the diverse cultures within it
combined with the raw talents that abound within Nigeria makes the
phenomenal growth of the film industry inevitable.
It is heart-warming though to note that Nigerian movies already
dominate TV screens all over West Africa and going even as far as
Central and Southern Africa. There is also a Western dimension to
this export market. According to the Filmmakers Cooperative of
Nigeria, every film in Nigeria has a potential audience of 15
million people within the country and about 5 million outside. These
statistics may be somewhat conservative considering that half of
West Africa’s 250 million people are Nigerians and according to the
World Bank, slightly over 7 million Nigerians are scattered around
the world, most of them in the developed economies. There is a
school of thought that talks about the rebirth of the film culture
in Nigeria. They claim that like in a horror movie, the infant film
market was gruesomely butchered at the altar of the oil boom
together with other sectors of the economy. The Indigenization
Decree of 1972, which sought to transfer ownership of about 300
cinema houses in the country from their foreign proprietors to
Nigerians did little to help matters. Though this transfer resulted
in the eruption of the latent ingenuity of Nigerian playwrights,
screenwriters, poets, and film producers, the gradual dip in the
value of the naira, combined with lack of finance, marketing
support, quality studio and production equipment as well as
inexperience on the part of practitioners, hampered the growth of
the local film industry.
At this juncture, I would like to go back a little in history. Film
as a medium first arrived on our shores in the form of itinerant
peephole hawkers of still pictures. These were soon replaced with
roving cinemas, which began feeding us with doses of American
western films. Edgar Rice Buroughs 1935 film “Sanders of the River”
which was partly shot in Nigeria helped in putting Nigeria on the
world film map through the participation of late Orlando Martins
(1899 – 1985) who acted in the film alongside the American actor
Paul Robeson. Orland Martins also featured in “Man from Morocco” and
“Black Libel” – his first film, which was never finished but gave
him the needed experience. It was however the part of Magole the
witch doctor in “Men of Two Worlds” that put him in the public eye.
Well before these films, Glover Memorial Hall is on record as having
been the first venue to show a film in Nigeria in August 1903.
Documentaries on the Queen’s visits to Nigeria, English football
matches, Westminster Parliamentary debates, and government-sponsored
films on health and education as well as legendary cowboy films soon
began dominating our cinemas in the late ‘50s up to independence.
Most of us old enough to remember this era of the Nigeria society
refer to it as the good old ‘50s and ‘60s and it was perfect timing
for a love affair between Nigerian film and Nigerian music. Sadly,
we had neither the technology nor the means to do our own films and
had to be satisfied with mostly foreign fare. Soon vast acres of our
urban surroundings became flooded with wall posters of alien culture
in the form of American, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese films. Our
kids caught on to the Kung-fu and Karate culture. Nigerians began to
know more about Bruce Lee, James Bond, and the travails of the
American Indians than they did about the Wole Soyinka-led Mbari
Mbayo culturual group, Hubert Ogunde’s troupe or other
socio-cultural history of Nigeria. Some significant successes were
recorded after independence when for about ten years after the
Nigeria civil war, Nigerian
literature and theatre got introduced to motion picture.
Representative of this new wave were the works of Ogunde, a doyen of
Nigerian art who understood that film and theatre were vehicles for
promoting indigenous language, art and culture. The Nigerian
nightlife scene subsequently came alive. Highlife music was the
in-thing and the music of the Koola Lobitos, The Oriental Brothers,
I. K. Dairo, Rex Jim Lawson, E. T. Mensah, and Victor Olaiya
reigned. Ola Balogun’s post civil war flick, “Amadi” took us back to
the pre-civil war days when Nigeria was one huge undivided house
where Igbo musicians sang Yoruba highlife and Yorubas sang Hausa
songs. “Amadi” was an Igbo film made by a Yoruba man and was clearly
a glimpse from the future of the film industry in Nigeria. This
early example of Nigerian art on celluloid using the best of Western
film techniques, was a breath of fresh air even if it was a low
technology, low budget experiment unable to impress the market
against the dominance of imports which though exotic did little to
promote Nigerian art. The film “Bisi – Daughter of the River” was
another fair effort on celluloid, which captured Nigerian culture on
film. “Dinner with the Devil” was another first generation Nigerian
film by the duo of Sanya Dosunmu and Wole Amele. Eddie Ugbomah’s
“The Great Attempt” was also another valiant film which was
unfortunately censored by the authorities. Several decades later,
the late Ogunde featured in Joyce Cary’s “Mister Johnson”, a film
that did little to elevate the sad perception of Blacks and
Africans. Thankfully in the 1980’s, the TV serialization of Chinua
Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” became hugely successful. I also recall
the small screen successes of the Adio Family, Village Headmaster,
Cock Crow at Dawn, The Masquerade, Mirror in the Sun, Check Mate,
Sura The Tailor, Awada Kerikeri and Second Chance on national
television and how these productions were indeed instrumental to the
revival of the local film industry and hence the birth of the home
video culture in Nigeria. Later in time, the austerity measures of
the early eighties and the Structural Adjustment Programme that
succeeded it, helped in no small measure in increasing the level of
poverty in the land. The Entertainment Industry was one of the worst
victims and had to move indoors. The few cinema houses existing
either had to close shop or were taken over by religious bodies.
This accelerated the birth of home video entertainment. Credit must
now be given to our second generation film industry pioneers – Amaka
Igwe, Tunde Kelani, Zeb and Chico Ejiro, The Amata brothers, Femi
Lasode, Olu Jacobs, Joke Jacobs (nee Silva), Liz Benson, Kenneth
Nnebue, Richard Mofe Damijo, Zachee Orji, Pete Edochie, Sam Loco Efe,
U.S. Galadima, Yinka Quadri, Genevieve Nnaji, Jide Kosoko, Omotola
Ekehinde and others – who inherited, without hesitation, the
commercial and artistic traditions of Nigerian film and theatre from
the likes of Hubert Ogunde, Moses Olaiya, Duro Ladipo, Ola Balogun,
Wole Amele, Eddie Ugbomah, just to name a few, and began to tell our
stories using the video format. By 1993 when the National Film
Festival was held for the first time our film industry score sheet
was moderate – about 25 English films, five Hausa films, 50 Yoruba
and One Igbo film.
In Western societies, a film’s commercial lifespan would normally
begin with a box office or cinema release, then video release, then
broadcast on fee-paying television, and finally on public
television. Producers and Marketers would then generate the
appropriate promotion and publicity to maximize profitability out of
each phase. The Nigerian experience with the video culture so far
has shown that without piracy, there are huge potentials for making
money in the industry. In South Africa, I understand that video
distribution usually doubles or triples a movie’s revenues. The
video boom is therefore not just a Nigerian phenomenon. Video
appears to be the home entertainment mainstay for the world’s
developing countries.
From all indications, the future of the Nigerian movie industry is
promising. I understand that every day, about three new low budget
movies are released into the market. Each film is then replicated
into about 200,000 video cassettes and distributed to markets, video
clubs and eventually various homes. This process creates jobs and
income for the people involved in the production, distribution and
marketing of the movies. It is only when we change our paradigm and
see film production as big business, that the film industry will
take its rightful position in the economy.
The Indian film industry has been projecting India’s culture
globally for over 50 years and has remained one of the most
important foreign exchange earning sources for that country.
Francophone West African films, which get showcased at FESPACO, the
Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, which holds
in the Burkinabe capital every two years has helped in improving the
quality and global appeal of Francophone films. As a result, these
countries film industries have contributed significantly to their
respective economies. The United States of America is the best
example of a perfect union between the film and the financial
services industries. Do you know that the American movie industry is
the second largest export revenue earner for that country, after the
aviation industry? Thanks to Hollywood and its spin offs, the state
of California, with a gross domestic product of $1.4 trillion, is
the fifth largest economy in the world, richer than the combined
wealth of all the 54 countries in Africa. Today, underscoring the
industry’s contribution to the rest of American society, the current
Governor of California is Arnold Shwarzzenegger, an actor. Former
President Ronald Reagan was also a Hollywood actor. These American
examples show us what the Nigerian movie industry can become in
terms of stature and relevance in society.
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Nigeria on-screen |
