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Abstract
The Nigerian National Film and Video Censors Board has played a key role in Nollywood's story, using classifications to promote spectacular narratives about the industry. The Board's 2006 Distribution Framework was an ambitious attempt to create a new set of classifications and constituted the Nigerian State's first serious attempt to regulate Nollywood marketing. It aimed to create a centralized film distribution structure, but its implementation was traumatic, with the parastatal Censors Board, industry guilds and individual marketers struggling to shape the process. This paper examines these institutions' conflicts over the enforcement of regulation and contestations over institutional legitimacy, and the marketers’ struggles for social self-realization. The initiative is analysed across four scenes: Impasse, Realignment, Coercion/Shaming, and Transformation. At the conclusion of the final scene, the Censors Board had largely succeeded in its confrontation with the guilds, but was unable to fully legitimate the Framework and to remould the marketers into the desired structure. This gave the marketers the space and ideological resources to appropriate the Board's conflict and contestation strategies through their own uses of the licences. Nevertheless, the Board did succeed in creating a new set of classifications, enabling it to create new industry-transforming narratives in the future.
Acknowledgements
I would like to offer my sincerest gratitude to the following informants who have showed great openness and welcomed me into the Nollywood community: DJ Abass at DJAMedia, Tunji Amure at HiTV, Moses Babatope at Talking Drum Entertainment, Philip Dada at Sound Image, Lady Stella at Stella's African Food Store, Lanre Davies and Adesope Olajide at Factory78, Obi Emelonye at The Nollywood Factory, Shabba Gbenga Aloto at Shabba Records, Tunde Kelani at Mainframe Productions, Akin Lami at AKHD Entertainment Toyin Moore at Nollywood Blockbusters, Peddie Okao at Prolens Movies, Alfred Soroh and Dipo Winsala at Nollywood Movies and Sandra Tobin-Spiff at SRTV. In addition, the following academics and industry experts have given me very helpful advice and comments, and been generous in sharing their work: Phoenix Fry, Alessandro Jedlowski, Carmen McCain, Paul Nugent, Michael Todd, Francoise Ugochukwu and David Wield. I would also like to thank Alexander Beresford, Lizelle Bisschoff and Laura Major for being helpful and industrious in editing this article to a high standard in excellent time. Finally, I thank Margarita Strelcenia for her enormous help and support throughout the course of this project.
Notes
1. The figure and comparison was given by the NFVCB to the Economist in 2006. The resulting article, ‘Nollywood Dreams’, published in July Citation2006, has been highly influential. The World Bank, which went on to pledge $25 million to the industry as part of its Growth and Employment in States programme, has referenced these statistics on a number of occasions (Radwan and Strauss Citation2010, 9; The World Bank 2011b, 14). A problem with the claim relates to industry coding. The Board gave a classification to a group of workers who had previously just been an amorphous part of the ‘informal economy’, without similarly lifting their colleagues (who trade other commodities) out of it by giving them equivalent codes.
2. It should be emphasized that these estimates are speculative and that only the NCC figure cited by Obiaya is based on a survey.
3. It is likely that the architects of the Framework favoured the second of these strategies. This was reflected in the comment made by TV executive Alfred Soroh who was present at a meeting in Abuja between the NFVCB and the marketers, in which he witnessed the Board, ‘trying to elbow out those marketers … (like they were) the bad guys or the mafia’ (personal communication, July 13, 2011).
4. ‘Local’ initially included three levels: state, local government authorities, and community retailers.
5. So that the community distributor would pay a N15,000 ($100) licence fee and have an operating fund of N100,000 ($650).
6. The analysis will use Scott's concept of institutions as social groupings that have a degree of durability and that are made up of symbolic elements, relational systems, social activities (routines) and material resources. Some theorists would argue that this definition makes our topic of inquiry specifically ‘organizations’, a subset of institutions.
7. The paper will not look in detail at the Hausa association or marketers. This was purely due to the methodological difficulty of including them in the research: the Hausa networks are relatively separate from those of the Southern industry, and I was unfortunately not able to expand the timescale of the research to include these.
8. Although Nu Metro had already entered the Nigerian distribution market in 2005.
9. Exhibitor Moses Babatope ‘(the Framework) is against the rot marketers [are] causing in [the] system, they are using the piracy machinary to assault the very skilled filmmakers’ (personal communication, July 12, 2011).
10. The prominent distributor Don Pedro Obaseki highlighted this problem:
In the past a lot of (the producers) had cheated money out of our friends (the marketers) in Idumota. At that time many of them were not producing films but were just buying the rights. Some producers went as far as selling the rights of the same film to three different people. (Barrot Citation2009, 75)
11. Jedlowski (Citation2010a) has already commented on the impact of the report on the industry.
12. Distributor B emphasized the celluloid tradition.
13. He himself referred to accusations by the Igbo marketers that he was following a Yoruba agenda because Yinka Ogundaisi, who helped him formulate the Framework, is a Yoruba.
14. Obiaya (Citation2011, 234) cites a national staff strength of just 540 persons.
15. Honour and social self-realization are related categories. Social self-realization may be considered a particular type of honour, with honour a broader category encompassing all of ‘a group's highest values’ and motivations (see Iliffe Citation2005).
16. For example Barber (Citation1982), ‘Popular Reactions to the Petro-Naira’.
17. As Marketer Toyin Moore stated, ‘they are only interested in commerce, so they have to be at the market end’ (personal communication, July 18, 2011).