Read Frank Nweke Jnr.'s opening speech at Nigerian Entertainment Conference

By Frank Nweke

Let me start by saying that I feel greatly honoured to be invited to declare this first ever Nigerian Entertainment Conference pen. When I was first approached to do this I was somewhat sceptical about the motives of the organisers given the phenomenon and proliferation of conferences in Nigeria in recent times. However, after meeting and interacting with the organisers, through a mutual friend, I had no doubt in my mind about their good and well thought out intentions and have had to adjust my schedule to be here this morning.

May I therefore take this opportunity to recognise and pay my respects to both Ayeni (Adekunle) and Chris Ihidero for this initiative and urge them to sustain this dialogue not just amongst their peers in the creative industry as we have categorised the sector within the Nigerian Economic Summit Group but also with government due to its pre-eminent role in policy formulation and regulation.

Such sustained engagement amongst yourselves and between yourselves and government will hopefully help you build consensus on the most critical issues afflicting the sector but more importantly, mobilise stakeholder action towards the emplacement of appropriate policies to address the significant problems which have stunted the growth and the realisation of the full potential of this neglected, yet vital sector of our economy.

Nigerians have always loved a thrill. In every aspect of our lives, mundane or spiritual, different forms of entertainment are an ever present reality. Long before colonial contact, in our villages, towns and cities, music, dance and theatrical performances were an integral part of everyday life. Whether welcoming a child into the world or bidding farewell to a departed elder journeying into the land of our ancestors, we sang and danced in massive proportions. In thanking the gods for a bountiful harvest, crowning a new king (or mourning a departed one) or seeking divine intervention in times of crisis, we employed music, dance, acrobatic performances – all done in appropriate costumes – to express our  innermost feelings. You rarely have to give the average Nigerian a reason to entertain or be entertained; we would always find a reason and a way to do so anyway! This may not be exactly peculiar to our culture alone but could be said for several other cultures and peoples around the world. However, our qualification as the happiest people in the world some years ago appeared to have placed Nigerians in a class of our own!

Entertainment plays a pivotal role in society as a stress and tension diffuser. Many of us will remember a great book, song, beautiful theatrical performance or amazing movie because of the profound impact they had on us at certain moments when we were down or even at such times when we are happy and therefore serve to reinforce our state of emotional well being, however transient it may be. Depending on the creativity of the artiste and the thrust of the lyrics of a song or script of a movie or drama, for some people, these times may become significant opportunities for soul searching and self rediscovery, forcing us to re-examine our conduct as individuals and our contributions to the society in which we live.

Beyond this, entertainment gives ‘thought’, ‘voice’ and ‘sight’ to a society’s culture and shared values. It gives it ‘thought’ through the creative genius of the artistes and writers and the unique ways in which they capture and document their perspectives on a society’s culture. It gives it voice through the vocalisation of their thoughts and feelings and connection with their audiences and the society at large. Entertainment, gives ‘sight’ to a society’s shared values through the dramatisation and the visual expression of an artiste’s thoughts on the culture of a people.

A society thrives on shared values, and entertainment provides an avenue to engage those values on their currency and continued viability, constantly reminding the owners of a culture who they are and what they represent. In the same way, through entertainment they tell a unique story to the world about themselves and their people and it is the messages and perceptions which their creativity projects that shape the way they are seen in the larger society or the world as the case may be. Entertainment, therefore serves as a constant reminder of who we are, where we are coming from, where we are and indeed our destination.

Music, film and television are the biggest avenues for creative expressions that have kept us entertained for millennia all over the world. In Nigeria, as with other places on the continent of Africa, our first contact with the cinema was through propaganda as disseminated by the colonial masters. We were shown films that tended to dehumanise us while celebrating the superiority of our colonial invaders. The films of the likes of Hubert Ogunde, Moses Olaiya (Baba Sala), Ishola Ogunsola, Ola Balogun, and others would eventually rescue us from this debilitating situation and birth a cinema tradition we could call our own. It is, of course, true that we consumed more Hollywood, Bollywood and Chinese films during this period, but these Nigerian pioneers constantly reminded us of our potential and possibilities.

In music, while we grooved to the sounds of the likes of James Brown, it was the music of Cardinal Rex Lawson, Stephen Osita Osadebe, Victor Umaifo, Bongos Ikwue, Ramblers International Band, Bobby Benson, Dan Maraya Jos, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Victor Olaiya, Sonny Okosun, Christie Essien Igbokwe, Onyeka Onwenu, Kris Okotie, King Sunny Ade and many more that filled our collective consciousness and fuelled our celebrations. Backed by solid structures, provided by both indigenous and foreign record labels, these artistes provided quality music for every facet of our lives. Through abundant talents, trained and tested instrumentalists and a supportive economic environment that allowed for unhindered creative expression, these musicians presented the best in Nigerian music that has been difficult to match, let alone better. When Michael Jackson, Billy Ocean, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, and Tina Turner ruled the world in the late 70s and 80s, the continued presence of structured record labels, low to none-existent piracy and an efficient and effective distribution system ensured that we could also boast of the likes of Felix Liberty, Dizzy K. Falola, Alex O, Majek Fashek, Ras Kimono, Stella Monye, Sir Shina Peters, Adewale Ayuba, Alex Zitto, Evi Edna Ogholi, The Mandators, Oritz Wiliki, Funmi Adams, and many more.  The music scene was hugely successful and rewarding of excellence; a pointer to the possibilities of a structured environment.

In television, the Nigerian Television Authority was blazing the trail in quality entertainment programming across the African continent. You were assured of fabulous programmes on a daily basis. From quality news programmes to magazine programmes, documentaries and television drama, the NTA was a major force to reckon with. At least four nights every week, the NTA ensured that we were glued to our television sets watching one award-winning drama series after another. Right into our living rooms, the NTA brought glorious soaps and series like Cock Crow at Dawn, The New Village Headmaster, The New Masquerade, Mirror in the Sun, Ichoku, Koko Close, Samanja, Sura the Tailor, Behind the Clouds and many more. The first set of Nigerian screen stars were all created by the NTA, and many ended up forming the nucleus of the actors that birthed Nollywood in the early 90s. Today however , the story is different, a sad reminder of how low we have fallen, such that NTA which opened at 4pm and closed at midnight provided more entertainment in the 70s and 80s than all the local television station we have today, put together. Worse still, NTA once an exceptionally outstanding institution, now suffers from an acute case of rent mentality, expecting independent producers like many of you in this room to go and do the hard work of producing content and then come and buy airtime to broadcast the content to Nigerian audiences. The NTA and all other television stations hold airtime in trust on behalf of Nigerians, and the present scenario of airtime sale is a shameful anomaly, in my view.

When the Nigerian economy experienced a downward turn in the late eighties, one of the dire consequences was its adverse impact on the very fabric of society which had supported a thriving entertainment culture. With the recession of the 80s, most of the funding for films dried up and most of the cinemas were soon taken over by Pentecostal churches and fast-food outlets. The NTA, which had previously excelled at birthing great local content, started importing aged Latin-American soap operas and thereby killed a world-class tradition of Nigerian television drama. The record labels that had brought about a flourishing music industry closed down and many of the great artistes of the eighties fled abroad in search of the proverbial greener pastures, leaving a gaping hole at the heart of quality music production and distribution. Things had fallen apart and the centre could no longer hold to the borrow the words of the late venerable author and one of Nigeria’s best and brightest, Chinua Achebe. The entertainment industry was on a downward spiral and nothing was going to stop it until it hit rock bottom.

The 90s brought us Nollywood with Kenneth Nnebue’s Living in Bondage, and new Nigerian music began taking firm footing. Today, Nollywood is a global phenomenon, excelling beyond everyone’s imaginations in spite of obvious technical deficiencies and a grossly inadequate distribution structure, which has given room for piracy to thrive at an alarming rate of 82%, possibly the highest in the world. Nigerian musicians have practically colonised the African continent and are now spreading their tentacles all over the world. Great as these successful narratives may sound however, we must remember the dangers of a single story. We must engage a different narrative which obviously shows that, when looked at critically, the entertainment sector in Nigeria has grossly underperformed in the past two decades at least. The support structures for a viable entertainment industry which collapsed in the 80s, have still not been rebuilt, and if we want to be honest with ourselves, the successes we celebrate today in the entertainment industry are minuscule compared to the potential and possibilities present in our country. Let me illustrate with two quick examples:

The American rapper Jay Z released the first of his over 15 albums so far, Reasonable Doubt, in 1996, aged 27 years old. The album went platinum, as all his albums have done. In 2007, he sold his share of Rocawear clothing line for $204m and a year later he signed a ten year tour deal with Live Nation worth $150 million.  He is the co-director of Budweiser Select and part owner of NBA’s New Jersey Jets, 40/40 night clubs, as well as Arsenal Football club. He has endorsement deals with Chevrolet, Budweiser, Armadale Vodka, Hewlett Packard and many other brands. This time last year, Forbes Magazine estimated Jay Z to be worth around $460 million, and with continued success, his net worth is expected to hit the $1 billion mark in the near future.

James Cameron has been responsible for some of the biggest cinema box-office hits of the past thirty years: from the Terminator franchise to Titanic and Avatar. His movies have grossed billions of dollars. In 2010, Cameron made an estimated personal income of $260 million, thanks to the success of Avatar. What that means is that Cameron made more money from one film than the N30 billion (about $200m) the federal government of Nigeria made available to the entire entertainment sector in Nigeria through the Nigerian Export – Import Bank, NEXIM and the Bank of Industry, BOI.  The obvious question that jumps to mind immediately is: What conditions make it possible for the likes of Jay Z and James Cameron to extract maximum revenue from the value chain of their creative expressions in the United States that aren’t available to the likes of 2face Idibia and Amaka Igwe here in Nigeria?

The simple answer is, of course, that they live in a society that understands that enabling structures are integral to deriving true value from any endeavour. When Jay Z makes his music, he doesn’t spend time worrying that pirates will hijack his product and prevent him from recouping his investment or maximising profit. The same can’t be said for 2Face or any of the musicians in this room. When James Cameron is done making his films he knows there are thousands of cinemas waiting to take them off his hands and screen to a waiting audience. He knows that when he’s done at the cinemas, DVD distributors, online content distributors and television networks are there to further push his films and ensure that he derives maximum worth from the value chain of his creativity. Once again, the same cannot be said for Amaka Igwe, Kunle Afolayan, Tunde Kelani and all other filmmakers present in this room today. Considering the complete lack of infrastructural support, it is truly a miracle that we have an entertainment industry at all.

Beyond infrastructure, there are many public policy constrains bedevilling the entertainment industry, chief of which is a lack of appreciation and protection of intellectual property rights. Because infrastructure is lacking, the artiste is at the mercy of those who wish to benefit from his creativity without making any meaningful contribution to his career. The marketers in Alaba International market can gather songs from different artistes onto a compilation CD and sell, and there’s little or nothing the musicians can do. They can’t seek redress in court because there are no precedents to inspire them to do so. In fact, when their next albums are ready, they still have to go back to the same people that exploited them, in order to sell their albums. The same thing happens to filmmakers. Laws do exist to tackle intellectual property infringement, but how effective are they? Has the Nigerian Copyright Commission been effective in putting copyright issues in the forefront of engagements in the entertainment sector?

A combination of abject deficiencies in knowledge and skills, as well as a seeming lack of exposure, continue to make it impossible to fully appreciate the entertainment sector as a worthy enterprise. For many, both practitioners and consumers, the entertainment industry is really not a lot more than a plaything. For many people, it is impossible to see this industry in all its true potential as a major job provider, revenue earner and major contributor to Nigeria’s GDP. Rather, they are quick to dismiss the people in this sector as mere fun providers, not entrepreneurs.

It is necessary to place on record that however one looks at it, it will be remiss of either I or anyone else to suggest that the fault lies with government and the society at large, alone. Government has not done too well with the enforcement of our copyright laws, the truth however remains that a good number of people in this room this morning lack even the most rudimentary understanding of business. Who are you? How do you see yourself? What is your sense of self worth? What is your understanding of business? Do you know what it means to have a business plan? Or do you rely on the one created for you by others? And there is nothing wrong with others creating a plan for you, but do you understand this plan? How do you carry yourself? Do you have a corporate identity? Do you have a registered company? Does your conduct portray you as serious minded enough in business as you are on your creative side? Do you have the courage of conviction to fight for your rights? Do you have enough sense to hire professionals to help you when the need arises or are you one of them….’I too sabi’ becoming a lawyer when you need one and yet you have never touched a law book or become an accountant when you need one? I would like to assure you that the issues which I have highlighted above are just as debilitating as government’s inability to fully enforce our copyright laws thereby encouraging pirates to continue to thrive. May I therefore urge you to introspect on the points I have raised above and decide how you want to turn around your fortunes in the sector in which you operate.

Some weeks ago, the Tony Elumelu Foundation and AllWord Network honoured the fifty fastest growing companies in Nigeria at an event in Lagos. I wasn’t surprised to see that there wasn’t a single entertainment company on that list. A cursory glance at the financial earnings of some of the companies on that list showed that many of you here earn more in a single weekend or at a single concert than those companies do in a month or a quarter. But they are structured businesses, with obvious lines of business transactions, corporate identities, trackable income and expenditure and a general serious business look and feel. Many of you here will earn more than these businesses in the short run, but you and your careers will be distant memories while many of these companies will continue to do great business well into the future.

Again, I will raise even more questions! Where are the business edifices to meet your hype and lifestyles? Where are your plans to ensure that you remain relevant when you’re no longer the hit maker? How much of what you make today is being ploughed back into your industry?

When you fail to put proper structures in place and organise your business and by extension your industry, you simply become a floater for lack of a better word and you are carried whichever way the current flows….then you are at the mercy of others who know what they want…. those whose business is to acquire content or simply pirate or those who simply distribute or those who know that you are not organised enough to source the funds you require for your business, to name a few.

You are also at the mercy of a special group of people, the latest invaders of the sector, politicians! You become a tool in the hands of either people in power or people seeking power. They do with you as they wish because they have no respect for you when all is said and done. They erode your self-worth, ultimately and impose a sense of gratitude on you, simply because you will not fully maximise the benefits from the value chain of your enterprise.

You are left to genuflect before those whose responsibility it is to put in place policies which should help you realise your full creative and entrepreneurial potential, but now hire you to make appearances at functions to nourish their egos and obtain for a mess of porridge an endorsement which they do not deserve and which they would subsequently deploy in further impoverishing our nation and people if and when they have won elections. At that point, there will be no further use for you or your type….until the election cycle returns!

What you do not understand, perhaps, is the power you hold as shapers of values and influencers of the collective consciousness of the society. If you understood the influence you can wield and organise yourselves into proper pressure groups, politicians wouldn’t come and hire you for propaganda during elections or have you attend functions so that they may be seen in photographs beside stars; they would instead be negotiating for your votes and the votes of millions of people whose consciousness can easily be influenced by your creativity. They will be negotiating with you and your guilds and associations on what they will do for you when they get into power. No sector or industry has more power than the entertainment industry in terms of mass influence. It isn’t for nothing that President Obama courted and got endorsements from the likes of Oprah and Jay Z. You open yourselves to abuse for as long as you fail to put proper structures in place and organise yourselves into influential pressure groups.

At this point, I would like to commend the organisers again and all of you participants for attending. This is an important conference and it is my expectation that you will have very constructive discussions around the issues which have impeded the development of the creative industry. A lot of these issues are fairly well known. May I therefore suggest that whilst it great to express your knowledge of the issues, it will be more useful to focus on implementable solutions to these problems and agree on the various stakeholder levels where interventions will be needed to remove identified bottlenecks and other impediments to growth.

I implore you all not to fear to face the truths that may hurt. Look yourselves in the eye and lay it all bare. It will do your industry a world of good, and perhaps in no time a paradigm shift will occur that will put you all and your industry on a pedestal that shows serious thinking and implementation of ideas that will be truly worthy of your collective creative and entrepreneurial spirit.

Just in case any of you is in doubt about the potential and the possibilities which this industry holds, perhaps the following statistics will help your understanding and reinforce your self esteem.

The global entertainment industry has produced some of the world’s most powerful and highly influential celebrities – according to the Forbes Magazine[1], a leading source of celebrity wealth rankings.

A selection of the top 15 most powerful celebrities in the global entertainment industry boast of a combined net worth of about US$10 billion[2], which comfortably exceeds the national income of the 6 lowest ranking African countries by gross domestic product (GDP) – Lesotho, Cape Verde, Liberia, Seychelles, Gambia and Guinea.(see Table 1).

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report[3] on the global entertainment industry, the United States earned about US$485 billion in entertainment revenues in 2012, and this would increase to US$555 billion by 2015.These figures dwarf the current GDP of any country on the African continent – including South Africa with a GDP of US$384 billion and Nigeria with a GDP of US$269 billion. (seeTable 2).

Let me emphasise this by creating the following analogy: if all 314 million Americans were entertainers, they would each have earnedUS$1,545 in 2012 – this is known as America’s entertainment revenue per capita.

In contrast, Nigeria’s overall GDP per capita of US$1,572 is just a little above America’s entertainment revenue per capita.Yet, as Richard Corliss (Time’s Movie Critic) brilliantly compares Nollywood to Hollywood in his profile of our own Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde, who is now one of Times 100 most influential people in the world:

“The world’s most productive English-language film industry is not Hollywood but Nollywood. The teeming Nigerian cinema grinds out some 2,500 movies a year, mostly direct-to-DVD quickies mixing melodrama, music and an evangelical Christian spin.Employing a million Nigerians, Nollywood enthrals millions more who come for the thrills, the uplift and the artful agitations of Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde — the Queen of Nollywood.”[4]

Ladies and Gentlemen, these brief comparisons above significantly underscore the economic importance of the entertainment industry in Nigeria and its substantial income generating capacity both for government (in terms of taxes) and citizens (in terms of employment and income per capita), especially in a developing economy like Nigeria.

Table 1: World’s Most Powerful Celebrities in 2012 and their Net Worth

Sources: Forbes and Celebrity Net Worth, NESG Research

The selected African Countries include the 15 African countries with the lowest GDP in the continent 

Table 2: Top 12 African Countries ranked by GDP

Sources: IMF, NESG Research

I thank you for your time and attention and wish you all fruitful deliberations.