How can you describe the lack of activities that seems to be happening in Nollywood right now?

I was asked this kind of question some days back and at the risk of sounding tedious I will give the same answer I gave before; Nollywood had already melted down before the melt down and it is the inevitable end result for total lack of foresight; lack of planning; lack of strategic thinking; lack of fresh ideas; lack of government initiatives and lack of everything. That is a recipe for failure, nothing else would have happened if not what is happening now; it would have taken a miracle for us to have had any other conclusion except where we are today at a standstill and you should know that if anything is at a standstill there is a tendency to go into reverse but if you at in motion there is no way you can decline. So we are at a stand still and I am sure that very soon we will begin to regress.

Do you think that the directive from the National Films and Video Censor’s Board (NFVCB) on the new distribution framework is responsible for the stand still?

It will be unfair to put the blame on the new distribution framework because the strategy is a very laudable initiative irrespective of whatever flaws that may be inherent in that proposal considering the fact that this is the first effort and attempt by government in 15 years to make a definitive intervention in Nollywood; there has not been any initiative at all in any form whatever from the government.  To my mind, what we need to do is to properly analyse this initiative and find out what we need to add and remove and not the condemnation by some sectors of the industry.

Recently, a ban was placed on foreign soaps to be aired during primetime and this created a 400 hours space on our local television stations, do you think local producers can meet up the challenge?

Yes. You see, protectionism is an economic strategy which can work and that is what they are trying to implement; that is to protect the local industry. Nigeria is a very large country and the audiovisual industry is also very big so I am certain that the local production companies are equal to the task but however, the mistake we often make in Nigeria is to pose solutions in isolation of other factors and you know these things are intertwined and interwoven. So a mere directive on its own may not necessarily not be enough to achieve the desired results; there are other factors to be looked at, issues of funding, some form of institutional funding scheme. It’s very strange that our law makes provision for Radio and Television Tax; as usual, that will look very interesting on paper. The law now proscribes that this tax should be collected by the local government and that is where things begin to go wrong very rapidly. I am sure the framers of the constitution had in mind that the local government, being the closest to the people, would be in a better position to collect this tax but where we always get it wrong and shoot ourselves in the foot is when the local governments now treat this Radio and Television Tax as their own revenue which shouldn’t be so.  But that is not the idea because in developed countries, this tax is used to fund Free Television and Radio like in the UK, stations like BBC, VOA and others that people don’t pay to receive their signal when you are not a paid TV, this tax is used to fund the programs. But in Nigeria there is no such thing in place.

What ways do you think this ban on foreign programmes can help the industry positively?

First and foremost, you know, to a very large extent, the movie industry owes a lot of its origin to television and so there is still a very close link between the movie industry and television, its not like what you have in US and other developed world so the average film production company could be a television production companies with relative ease. I am aware that a lot of production companies have been producing local programs in anticipation of this demand; here in Craftsman Production which is production outfit, we have produced one season each of two drama series which we are hoping to put on air this quarter and we are working on more.

With this kind of recess Nollywood is undergoing at the moment, do you see other motion picture industries of other African countries overtaking Nollywood as the largest producers of home movies?

That may be wishful thinking because big is tied to size; size is tied to market and market is tied to population. So if you look at maybe countries like Sierra Leone with a population of maybe five or six million people or there about, Ghana has a population of 22 million and the Ghanaian film industry has been much more organised and stable than Nollywood, they cannot become bigger than Nollywood; it is impossible because of the simple economics involved. In Nigeria you have probably over 1000 film producers and close to or more than 50 000 actors. These are all the indices that combine to determine the value of the industry. And even if we say that Nollywood is in a stand still, it does not mean productions are not taking place. What we are saying is that the policy environment and the institutional mechanism is not there so things are supposed to move faster than they are at the moment. And of course, what we started in Nollywood has since been copied very successfully in many African countries and the most notable is Kenya with there Riverwood and these improvements have been reflected in some of the awards in Nigeria where you see a lot of entries from other African countries like Cameroun that never had a motion picture industry. So if you are telling me that they are going to overtake Nollywood in terms of ranking, I am waiting for that day.

As the Secretary of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), how do you rate the film industries in other African countries as compared to Nollywood in terms of quality and organisation?

If you talk about quality, it is relative. For instance, if I look at the Francophone countries as an economic unit, you could very easily argue that they make quality films simply because they make one or two films on celluloid which is to a large extent is of internationally standard but now, film making has since been democratized by digital technology. So that fundamental basis for these claims right now is questionable. If we are saying that they make quality films on celluloid, what do we mean by quality in terms of technology that is used? But at the same time, let us look at the level of audience development, the level of appreciation from the audience; if you tell me that you make quality films in Africa that nobody in Africa watches then I begin to wonder what benchmark they are using because I know a lot of African films that were made that were not made by Africans. Even though, because of our the quantity we have some flaws, there are still Nollywood films that are genres of film that you see, like The Five Apostles which won the grand prize at the Lagos International Film Festival and has since been nominated in many other films awards; it is a fantastic movie, look at 30 Minutes by Ego Boyo, it is a nice movie. But naturally, simply because of the sheer quantity, you must inevitably have less of quality but that is not to make a sweeping generalization on Nollywood films.

The African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) has been held for the umpteenth time in Nigeria, since this is a Pan-African Film awards, don’t you think that the recurrent hosting of AMAA in Nigeria will make it appear as Nigeria and lose appeal as truly African?

I don’t know whether it would be appropriate for me to comment on AMAA but there are certain things that will make an event or an institution African and the least of it is the location or city it takes place because it must take place somewhere. Even if you decide to move AMAA to a different African country every year, that only does not make it African. Assuming that you have a jury that is made up of only Nigerians and also have entries from only Nigerians and every year AMAA moves to a different African country; will you say it is African? I will not say it is African in a sense; I can say it is African in a sense in terms the geography of the venue but it is not African in its entirety.  I think that what AMAA needs to do is to institutionalize itself as an African platform and this can be done by widening the participation of Africans at the level of the screeners, at the level of the jury, entries and then, even more institutionally, at the level of the board; these are what determines whether it is Nigerian or African. I will like to see an AMAA that will have that kind of composition and I will give you an example; I am the Regional Secretary of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), I am a member of the executive committee or the bureau, that bureau has 18 members from different countries in Africa. FEPACI has a central secretariat in South Africa, a Head Quarters in Burkina Faso and regional secretariats across Africa, Europe and Diaspora; that is what we call being African. Those are the things we look at; is the organizing committee drawn from all different regions of Africa? Is the Board African in terms of members drawn from other African countries? These are what we should be looking at.

We saw Bollywood dominating Hollywood in the last Academy Awards otherwise called the Oscar Awards where Slumdog Millionaire carted home record eight awards, do you see Nollywood with the way it is going achieving this kind of feat one day?

First and foremost, I must be obliged to challenge a fundamental assumption, would you call Slumdog Millionaire a typical Bollywood movie? I will say no; it was not directed by an Indian, it was directed by Danny Boyle and was an American production that was set in India. This issue has been coming up all over the world and people have been celebrating Slumdog Millionaire as a triumph of Bollywood but I am saying that is not a Bollywood movie because it is lacking in the typical things that make it a Bollywood movie which is song and dance; these are critical key elements and then the composition of the cast and crew. If you want to choose a movie, a typical Bollywood movie, would you in all honesty take Slumdog Millionaire? But going to the question, cinema is probably, to my mind, the most political business in the world; it is extremely political and politicized. As far as I am concerned and know from attending many film festivals all over the world, the mere fact that your film is very good does not mean it will win the award. I am telling you that categorically that, assuming we make a movie that is better then Slumdog Millionaire, it is not automatic that it will  go and win an Oscar and beat an American film because there is no where in the books that it is said that it is said that the fact your film is good guarantees awards. If you look at the facts, Bollywood has always produced the highest number of films for many years now, even more than Hollywood but Bollywood has in the last five years emerged as a major factor in international cinema because they were able to restructure their industry; in fact they had almost the same problem that Nollywood is having now about five-six years ago. There was intervention by the government and corporate financing that came in so they were able to create conglomerates with enough funding ; we are talking about firms like the Reliance Group which could give Steven Spielberg $500m for his company and told him that there is more where that money came from; the same Reliance came to Cannes In 2008 writing cheques for all the A-List actors, I was there; they wrote cheques for Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, virtually all the big boys in Hollywood and an India company gave them money. So who are these people who vote for the best films in the Academy Awards? Remember also that in the last five –six years, India has signed a lot of bilateral and multilateral treaties with a lot on audiovisual; these treaties insures a very high level of international access, acceptance and collaboration and it may interest you to know that Nigeria has no single co-production, bilateral or multilateral treaties with anybody on audiovisual, so where are we going to get the Oscar from? Are we going to jump from Ajegunle and go to Los Angeles to carry all the Oscars and come back? I am not saying that that a treaty is a prerequisite or a pre-condition to winning an award, but the politics of cinema which I challenge anybody to a public debate is such that the mere fact that you make a good film will win you the award does not follow. Yes, South Africa won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with Totsi the other day but we know the process they went through; it is as a result of a 10 year plan. It is impossible for Nollywood films to win an Oscar, how you can compete with the people that have been preparing since. Which funding will you use to get there? There is a process that has to be followed. Where is the Nigeria Film Corporation that is supposed to be developing the industry? What are they doing? For me, it is a virtual impossibility right now with the way things are going; it is like comparing a subsistent farmer in your village to somebody using mechanized farming.

Robot  # 1 | 19.07.2009 14:28

://img36.imageshack.us/img36/2997/madu1073.How can you describe the lack of activities that seems to be happening in Nollywood right now? I was asked this kind of question some days back and at the risk of sounding tedious I will give the same answer I gave before; Nollywood had already melted down before the melt down and it is the inevitable end result for total lack of foresight; lack of planning; lack of strategic thinking; lack of fresh ideas; lack of government initiatives and lack of everything. That is a recipe for failure, nothing else would have happened if not what is happening now; it would have taken a miracle for us to have had any other conclusion except where we are today at a standstill and you should know that if anything is at a standstill there is a tendency to go into reverse but if you at in motion there is no way you can decline. So we a...Read the full article.