How Far Can Mr President’s $200M Go?

By Chris Ihidero

In my time as pioneer Editor of MADE, the men’s lifestyle magazine, there were, expectedly, more than a few challenges trying to produce a world-class magazine from Lagos, Nigeria. With a creative and production team scattered in three countries across two continents, putting each edition of the magazine together was the true definition of stress. Edited in Lagos, designed in London, co-ordinated in Cape Town and printed in Lagos; add to that the trauma of chasing after writers who constantly forget deadlines or submit a 6000-word article where you asked for 750 words: the completion of each edition brought about relief of orgasmic proportions. However, all of this pales in significance when compared with what happens when the magazine is finished and ready for distribution. The creative process is bliss when compared with distributing anything in Nigeria.

Nothing in Nigeria is properly distributed, save for branded consumables like Indomie Noodles, Star, Guinness, Omo and the likes. Take a look at any creative segment of the country and in one form or the other, its creativity (and consequent entrepreneurial potentials) has been hindered by the gaping absence of any enduring distribution structure. Nollywood is comatose today, not really, because piracy is at about 83% in the industry, but because there’s no alternative structure to what is controlled by pirates masquerading as marketers. At its peak, Nollywood was distributed from three centres: Ebinpejo Lane, Idumota Lagos; Pound Road, Aba and Upper Iweka Raod, Onitsha. That’s three centres catering for 150 million people. A friend who runs one of the biggest music outfits (they can’t be called labels, can they?) with a leading R&B/Hip Hop artiste on its stable lamented to me how they had to sell the artiste’s last album to a marketer in Alaba for around N7.5m, being the only distribution offer they could get. Another friend, who has a more indie approach to his record label, told me that they would have done business if his artiste sold 40, 000 copies directly, without Alaba. Knowing all of this, I laughed really hard when I heard M.I say in that BET interview that his first album, Talk About It, had sold 4million copies. Truth is, M.I cannot ever know how many copies his album sold, seeing that the master-tape is in the hands of a marketer in Alaba. The case is not very different for many of the leading lights of Nigerian music today. Movies, music and magazines may be seen as luxury, but newspapers are essential to any society’s daily life. Distributing newspapers in Nigeria is a nightmare on a grand scale. Today, The Punch is Nigeria’s highest selling newspaper: it prints about 80, 000 copies daily, maybe 100, 000 copies on a great day. In a nation of 150 million people, we cannot sell a million copies of a newspaper? Some would erroneously blame this on illiteracy and affordability; this is a fallacy, seeing that we certainly have more than a million Nigerians who can read a paper like Punch and afford to pay N150 for it. The question is:  can The Punch afford to get the newspaper to them? Let’s us not be quick to forget that a mere couple of decades ago, The Daily Times was selling well over a million copies daily. Whoever invests in and solves this nation’s distribution problems, his/her great grand-children will sip liquid gold and much exquisite marbles.

Recently, Mr. President announced a $200M intervention fund for the entertainment industry, a laudable idea, seeing that the industry truly needs an intervention. Unconfirmed rumours have it that the fund is already being disbursed and some record labels, production companies and cinema investors have accessed the fund. If this is true, I believe that we have once more shown our age-long tendency to treat the symptoms and leave the disease to continue having a field day. As a writer and filmmaker, I do not necessarily need government loans to do my business. What I need the government to do for me is to put structures in place that will enable me do my business to the best of my abilities and achieve my full potentials. If, like anyone with a modicum of commonsense knows, distribution is the greatest threat to any creative endeavour in Nigeria, why is the government not working hard at redressing that situation? $200M (about N30B) is about the amount of money that would be needed to put a truly effective distribution framework in place, one that will ensure that M.I will not have to go to Alaba and handover the master tape of his next album; that investors take a second look at Nollywood and put meaningful funds into filmmaking, knowing that piracy will not rob them of equitable returns; that newspapers will free themselves of the burden of distribution and concentrate on the provision of quality content. In proper setting, $200m is what a couple of films or albums should be raking in, in a country of over 150m people.

If you stepped into a city like London today and thought of buying a CD or DVD, you probably will look for the nearest HMV store, or its equivalent. Your newspaper will most likely be dropped at your door, or you’ll find one at your local grocery shop or nearest train station. If you needed a book, there would be a W.H Smith store somewhere nearby, or any of the other bookstores. Take a moment and think of the kind of distribution framework that makes all of this possible. Think about what this translates to for the creative industries of the UK. When you are done, reverse you thought process and try to remember where you bought your last CD, DVD, newspaper of book. Yeah, in traffic! When the distribution of creativity has been reduced to a state where it largely exists on the roads of the most cosmopolitan city in the nation, what more is there to add? Today, you can drive out of your home naked and by the time you arrive at your place of work, you would have been fully clothed and fed by the hawkers on the streets who will push everything you need through your car windows.  This is our most effective mode of distribution, a sad pointer to our collective inability to build enduring structures.

If the federal government banned the sale of CDs, DVDs, Newspapers, and books in traffic, that single act will be more impactful than Mr. President’s $200m.

Ihidero is a Lagos-based writer and filmmaker