Concerning Project Nollywood

The $200m  intervention fund offers Nollywood the opportunity to put its house in order for a relaunch

President Goodluck Jonathan last week went beyond lip service to take the long overdue step of providing funds to further leverage Nigeria’s fledgling home video industry. This came in the form of $200 million for a special progamme tagged Project Nollywood. The grant, which has created a lot of excitement in the movies industry, falls within the administration’s planned assistance to a sector that is expected to generate considerable income to the nation while providing employment to many.

At about 20 years of age, Nollywood can be said to have come of age. This is with regard to global impact and recognition, as well as its ambassadorial role in projecting Nigeria. Without any doubt, it is today our nation’s most widely acknowledged cultural export and one that has become a marketing point for certain aspects of African fashion and fashion accessories. Against the background of the foregoing, Nollywood needs all the encouragement it can get in order to expand and improve. But there are issues.

The envisaged radical rebirth of Nollywood will remain a mirage if the industry stakeholders do not quickly put their house in order, by ending the factional and other squabbles wracking some of its best platforms. Except this is done, and done quickly and decisively, the presidential intervention could actually signal the demise of Nollywood. This is because a misguided scramble for dominance by the various guilds, or even renewed leadership tussles based on wrong notions about what the intervention fund is all about, may spell doom just when a bright light appeared at the end of the tunnel. This must not happen.

Industry big wigs must relate to the announced funds and the envisaged improvements in the sector with every sense of responsibility; rather than start salivating that the time has come for individuals and groups to fight over ‘Ghana Must Go’ bags and haul away as many as they can. Government officials who will also be in charge of disbursement should not see this as another slush fund for political patronage and self-enrichment.

As has been attested to by many experts, Nollywood has the capacity to create hundreds of thousands of jobs across such industry skill areas as set design, make-up, prop design and management, directing and much more. With this financial intervention, more schools and facilities for editing and post-production skills can therefore be established to expand and improve opportunities for development and expansion. There should also be some investment in proper writing and script conference skills, as well as professional self-management training for actors and actresses.

Besides the foregoing, the time has come for Nollywood to have its own Movie Production Village. Industry stakeholders should also design some means of providing revolving funds out of the government largesse, for credible players to facilitate the birthing of many brilliant projects and ideas that have been held back for years because of the limited means of their creators. This is the time to improve content, re-profile the technical quality of productions and take Nigeria to where the rest of the world is in the industry.

The federal government $200 million intervention also offers the various regulatory agencies in the sector the opportunity to pull themselves together for a relaunch. Anti-piracy and content protection measures should now be driven with contemporary tools which can be easily obtained all over the globe. Insurance and artistes’ rights issues, including contract guarantees and the creative independence of directors can now be taken up within a framewok of civilised professionalism.

We commend the Federal Government for having the presence of mind to leverage this sector and the president for keeping his word on a pledge he made many months back. It is now time for the industry stakeholders to justify the confidence so robustly demonstrated by showing Nigerians and the world that a new day has come for Nollywood.