THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY ON THE VERGE OF BIG BREAK
With the inclusion of the creative industry on the list of sectors granted pioneer status and tax holidays, Nseobong Okon-Ekong predicts that there are more promising days ahead as financial experts now take a keen interest in entertainment and ancillary
It’s well past 8 O’clock at night. Ayeni Adekunle, CEO of Blackhouse Media, a Lagos-based public relations and digital marketing company has just emerged from a meeting. He needs a little time to relax his nerves before another round of consultation. His office is designed to accommodate a few nap rooms. Staff who need to clear their head can snooze for a couple of minutes to regain composure. Generous lunch is served on the house every work day. There are a few board games and a snooker table. A well-stocked bar complete accessories of a modern work environment. The staff are expected to put in long hours at work; so the employer meets this anticipation with a bouquet of offers that makes coming to work a pleasure. But that is not the reason Ayeni and his team are not particularly in a hurry to go home tonight. Coming from a newsroom background where the assignment at hand determines the closing time, he is used to task-driven duties. The Nigeria Entertainment Conference which he founded four years ago is just a few hours away. Last minute business must be taken care of to ensure everything goes well. The conference has not failed since it began in 2013. This year, it ran on the theme, ‘It’s Time for Africa’. That could only mean one thing to practitioners in the Nigerian entertainment space, having conquered Africa, move the continent to the world stage. This understanding is captured in Ayeni’s statement: “As the entertainment business in the world over continues to see rapid, shocking changes, with the future of the industry increasingly relying on information technology and new ideas, Nigerian Entertainment Today is bringing practitioners in Nigeria together, to put our house in order, while taking concrete steps to study global trends, understand them, master them, and put them to use – for the benefit of practitioners, consumers, corporates and society.” The year after the NEC began, Nigeria rebased her gross domestic products (GDP). The country immediately became the largest economy in Africa. Experts say this exercise is supposed to be done every five years. But it took Nigeria 24 years to conduct one. Although, entertainment was said to contribute 1.2 per cent of the USD510; a tiny drop compared to agriculture at 22 per cent or oil and gas at 15.9 per cent, nonetheless, it received the largest celebration not necessarily because entertainers are given to loquaciousness, the merriment was ignited because it was a novelty. It was the first official acknowledgement of a thriving sector that absorbs the creative energy of the country’s large youth population. With rebasing, Nigeria’s per capita income rose from USD1,555 to USD2,688. This pushed its world ranking up to 121st from 135th. Every player in the Nigerian entertainment industry agrees that the 1.2 per cent assumed contribution from that sector is far from the true position. The general belief is that the impact of the sector is more than what has been captured. The blurred lines have been lost to widespread infringement of rights and lack of organised framework. Since 2011, Tony Okoroji, Chairman of the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), has embarked on sensitisation programme every September 1. It is known as ‘No Music Day’, a day the music industry dedicates to bringing attention to the widespread infringement of the rights of song writers, composers, performers, music publishers, record labels and other stakeholders in the music industry in Nigeria. This has been a long walk from the days when artistes like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Charly Boy, Eedris Abdulkareem, Orlando Owoh and Onyeka Onwenu led protests that sometimes degenerated to physical assault against perceived or real infringers of copyright. Till today, even government institutions like the Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board still carry out Gestapo-style raid to seize pirated products and bring offenders to book. Deployment of crude force has not always been the only option. The Nigerian creative workforce has continued to explore imaginative methods of getting out of the quagmire. For instance, Nigeria became the first country in Africa to provide for the Private Copy Levy Scheme, a stream of revenue from the levy of gadgets like MP3s, MP4s, cell-phones, memory cards and flash drives which is paid through the collective management system to the artistes, writers and producers whose music, movies and books are stolen. However, this important scheme has not been imple- mented 22 years after. A protracted war between various interest groups in the creative industry sphere has given room to more devastating exploitation of rights. COSON believes it should be the only rights collecting manager in the country, but the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria headed by Mayo Ayilaran has continued to resist this notion. The two bodies are locked in a prolonged legal battle. Not too long ago, the MCSN went to town celebrating a victory of sorts. According to the body, both the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice and the National Assembly directed the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC), to “issue with immediate effect, an approval by way of license to the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria Ltd/Gte (MCSN) to operate as a collecting society for the purpose of the Copyright Act.” The current leadership of the Performing Musicians Employers Association of Nigeria (PMAN) led by Pretty Okafor has been canvassing a scheme known as ‘Bar Coding Technology for the Creative Industry in Nigeria.’ With Okafor’s wealth creation and welfare campaign, even a dead artiste is assured his due. Okafor may well be on the verge of unlocking a gold mine of wealth for Nigerian musicians; and indeed anyone in the creative industry, through a scheme that ensures automatic payment when their work is used. From a study that he commissioned a consortium of Nigerian companies to carry out, it was discovered that Nigerian music is number one in Africa and number three in the world. According to him, “the Nigerian entertainment industry is worth about N9 billion. The statistics and the research we did are accurate. We can actually raise between N15 and 16 billion every year. There will be a lot of tax coming to the federal and state governments. The only way that the country can get out of recession is to put in place and operate a credible structure that promotes and sustains the creative economy.”