The end of Nollywood's guilded age? Marketers, the state and the struggle for distribution

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.

Keywords:

• Nollywood
• Nigeria
• film
• marketers
• legitimacy
• NFVCB

Introduction

In May 2009, the publication of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report Analysis of the UIS International Survey on Feature Film Statistics (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2009, 3) prompted a wave of international interest in the Nigerian film industry. Two facts were picked up by journalists: that Nollywood was now the second largest film industry in the world, and that it had achieved this feat from the bottom up, without the benefit of state assistance (Jedlowski 2010a, 2). The sudden increase in interest changed the discourse about Nollywood. It was now an internationally recognized success story, which contributed to an upturn of investor interest and the growth of lucrative international markets.

On reflection, both Nollywood's lofty position in the international rankings and the lack of state involvement in this ‘success story’ are dubious (Jedlowski 2010b, 107–108). If we consider the report's methodology, it is strikingly not based on any primary data collection by UNESCO. The research was conducted by requesting each country's national film classification body to complete a form based on its own surveys. The UNESCO statistics are thus entirely dependent on the figures provided by the national certification boards.

The main criterion used by every major film board other than the National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) to define a ‘film’, is distribution through cinema exhibition. The figures provided by the American, Indian and British film boards each reflect this standard (UNESCO 2009; Central Board of Film Certification 2011, 5; British Film Institute 2012, 38).

By adding the proviso that the Nigerian statistics relate only to ‘video films’, the UNESCO report lost the main basis of comparability. Cinema exhibition is a crucial threshold for inclusion of a film in the statistics, as without it any motion picture on any medium running for over 60 minutes is eligible. If we accept this lower threshold, straight-to-video films should be included in the figures for all countries, and possibly made-for-television movies, as well as films created for online distribution. In reality, most national film boards do not collect or publish information on all of these types of film distribution.

Nollywood did not rise to prominence on the world stage despite the lack of government involvement, but rather because of the hyperactivity of its involvement (in film classification). The industry is the second largest not by number of films made or released but by number classified. The ‘success story’ results partly from the NFVCB's decision to include films in its headline statistics that would not pass the threshold elsewhere. This example of film output is one of a number of cases in which the way the NFVCB makes classifications has shaped statistical comparisons and industry narratives. Another instance is the Board's claim that Nollywood employs one million people and is therefore the second largest employer in Nigeria, which has been particularly influential in donor attitudes to the industry.¹

The Nigerian State, and specifically the NFVCB, is therefore already using its classifications to play a key role in shaping both the way in which Nollywood is spoken about and its economic development. This article is about the NFVCB's first attempt to extend its role beyond film classification and into the regulation of distributors. Announced in December 2006, the New Distribution Licensing Framework aimed to regulate participation in film marketing and support the creation of a centralized, national structure for the distribution of video discs. Driven by Emeka Mba, the powerful Director General of the NFVCB, the Framework became the most controversial initiative in the industry's history.

A sketch of the Nollywood value chain in 2006

The Nollywood distribution system in 2006 is dominated by a large population of small-scale distributors, known as ‘marketers’, and it is estimated that in about 80% of cases the marketer controls each part of the value chain, including financing, production and distribution (Ogunleye 2008, 47). In these cases, the marketer pays the director an upfront fee and co-ordinates the production of the film. When the film is completed, he then duplicates several thousand copies on VCD or DVD and brings them to one of the four markets that act as national hubs: Idumota and Alaba Markets in Lagos, Aba Market and Iweka Road Market in Onitsha. Here they are bought by individuals or smaller-scale marketers, who then take the discs to smaller regional markets for downstream trading. The discs purchased at these markets are often duplicated without authorization, and it is variously estimated that as a result, between 58% and 80% of revenues are earned through unauthorized distribution (Obiaya 2011, 309; The World Bank 2011, 22; Paulson 2012, 60).²

In the 20% of cases where the marketer does not control the whole value chain, he may be involved only with finance and distribution or simply with distribution (Ogunleye 2008, 47). In recent years there have been a few initiatives in which independent directors have attempted to break away from the marketers altogether, distributing the films through other channels, such as cinema exhibition and a new producer-owned market.

In total, around 1200 films per year are distributed, typically in the tens of thousands (Barrot 2009, 34; Paulson 2012, 58), selling at around N150–300 ($1–2) each (Miller 2010, 54; Obiaya 2011, 298). The average production costs of a film are variously estimated at just $15,000–50,000 (Barrot 2009, 34; Miller 2010, 59; Obiaya 2011, 152; Paulson 2012, 55); with production and post-production lasting about four weeks, and average legal sales lifespans of little more than two weeks (Miller 2010, 62; Obiaya 2011, 162).

Framework description

The NFVCB Framework attempted to transform the above situation in two ways. First, it aimed to regulate participation in the distribution arena by attracting new corporate entrants whilst excluding many existing small-scale marketers through strict licensing requirements.³ Second, it strove to mould the newly sanctioned pool of marketers into a national distribution system. This structure would comprise national marketers, with outlets in all regions of Nigeria, regional marketers, who would receive the discs from the national marketers, and local retailers⁴ who would sell the discs at the local markets (Jedlowski 2010b, 69; Obiaya 2011, 257–259).

To implement this plan all the marketers would have to obtain a licence from the NFVCB. The conditions of approval for licensing were strict. A national marketer would need to pay a N500,000 ($3300) licence fee and to take out an N50 million ($200) insurance bond and his network would need to cover all regions in order to qualify (Jedlowski 2010b, 69; Obiaya 2011, 259). Some saw this bond as a fund to guarantee marketer payment to producers (Producer Obi Emelonye, personal communication, July 11, 2011). The marketer would also have to demonstrate that he had a professional management structure including a lawyer and accountant. As a result of these strict entry requirements there would be a small group of large national marketers, which, it was hoped, would draw interest from corporate investors.⁵

The Framework was also designed to facilitate monitoring and enforcement measures. Every disc sold would have to be marked with a Censors Board stamp given to licensed marketers, and retailers would have to display their own licence number or the number of their supplier. In addition to ensuring that only licensed marketers could operate, it was hoped that these measures would help in the battle against piracy and make it possible to compile statistics for the number of discs released and sold.

The policy context

The Framework was the most important element in a wider series of initiatives through which the Nigerian state was attempting to increase its regulatory penetration. Other initiatives included the Motion Pictures Practitioners Council in 2009 (with the aim of licensing the production staff such as directors and actors), and the National Copyright Commission's Strategic Action against Piracy and Copyright Litigation and Mediation Programme in 2005 (Akaeze et al. 2009).

Beyond the film industry there had been major reforms of the Nigerian banking sector. Beginning in 2004 the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced a series of measures including the imposition of a very high minimum capital requirement for all banks, thus forcing a radical consolidation in the industry. The Framework had striking similarities with this reform, which had succeeded in increasing the sector's horizontal integration (Nelson 2012).

In addition to drawing inspiration from the banking reforms, the Framework can be seen as an attempt to take advantage of the financial flows that these reforms made possible. By formalizing its structure and becoming more investor friendly, it was hoped that Nollywood could take advantage of the backing available from the burgeoning banking sector (Marketer B, personal communication, October 31, 2012).

The Framework can also be seen in the context of increased competition between government agencies, which were proliferating as part of a trend towards decentralization in Nigeria (Meagher 2010, 141). In the years leading up to the Framework launch, two new state censors' boards were created: the Kano State Censors Board in 2001 and the Lagos State Film and Video Censors Board (LSFVCB) in 2005 (Obiaya 2011, 239). Obiaya, referencing the LSFVCB Director General, argues that the establishment of the latter board was an overt bid by Lagos State to capture the untapped income-generating potential of Nollywood (Obiaya 2011, 240). The LSFVCB Director General even claimed that his Board was already preparing to launch its own distribution framework before that of the National Board (Okudolo 2009). The Framework could thus be seen as a pre-emptive measure by the NFVCB to tap into this unexploited resource, in a scramble for control of Nollywood marketing. Although this deduction is speculative, we shall see that the working out of the relationships between these state censorship institutions certainly did play a role in the later development of the controversy.

Analysis of framework objectives

In order to analyse the objectives of the Framework, it is helpful to consider them through the lens of Global Value Chain Governance (Sturgeon 2008). The Nollywood value chain has traditionally been highly ‘consumer driven’: the marketers, who are ‘downstream’ in the value chain, have been far more powerful than the ‘upstream’ producers. This consumer-driven nature of the system has disrupted the flow of revenue back to the film producers. The relative weakness of the producers compared to the marketers has meant that they have little bargaining power: in the words of pioneering cinema exhibitor Moses Babatope, ‘There is no bidding process for the films, instead (the marketers) make threats … if you don't go with me, I'm going to pirate your film’ (personal communication, July 12, 2011). Leading producer Obi Emelonye complained that he gave his film to a well-known marketer but did not receive any money from distribution, and had little power to seek recourse (personal communication, July 11, 2011).

Furthermore, the producers have little bargaining power with the satellite television companies. Nigeria's first satellite television channel, Africa Magic, appeared in 2003. In the early years the channel did not even pay the producer a fee. This changed by around 2007, but the producers still only received around $700–$1500 for the rights to show the film indefinitely (Akaeze et al. 2009; Barrot 2009, 34).

Some producers attempted to remedy these problems through their early support of the Framework: Yinka Ogundaisi submitted the original Framework proposal and worked closely with Mba in the early stages, and Chief Gabriel Onye Okoye (known as Gabosky) was a close advisor and public advocate. They hoped that the insurance bond would act as a fund to guarantee marketer payment to producers (Producer Obi Emelonye, personal communication, July 11, 2011). The Framework therefore constituted an attempt to alter the vertical relations within the value chain, using the insurance bond as a guarantee of payment to the producers, and so strengthening their position in relation to the marketers.

Nollywood governance is also distinctive in terms of the horizontal relationships between the actors. This depends on whether activities are concentrated in a few large firms or spread across a large number of small firms contracting with each other (Sturgeon 2008, 6). Lorenzen and Taeube make a strong argument that the hierarchical, concentrated structure offers especially great economies of scale in marketing (Lorenzen and Taeube 2008, 290). They point towards the Bollywood case, where the increasingly concentrated distribution companies have been able to attract corporate investment, release a sufficient number of films into the cinemas simultaneously to crowd out piracy (Lorenzen and Taeube 2008, 295), invest enough in promotion to win over export markets, and even attract secondary markets in auxiliary products like toys and computer games (Lorenzen and Taeube 2007, 11).

This contrasts sharply with the Nollywood case, where the structure is much closer to pure market relations, with a large number of small organizations that are loosely affiliated with each other through ‘associational’ networking. In these terms, the Framework was a very bold institutional intervention with the objective of changing the nature of the horizontal linkages between the marketers so that they could operate effectively at a greater scale.

Institutions

The Global Value Chain approach suggests that the analysis of institutional interactions is key to understanding changes in governance structures (Sturgeon 2008). In the Licensing Controversy, the key institutions⁶ included the parastatal Censors Board and the guilds of marketers.

The NFVCB

The NFVCB was established in 1993 and has been influential as a censorship and certifying body. The Director General at the time of the Licensing Controversy was the dynamic Emeka Mba, formerly a satellite television executive. In addition to the NFVCB, there are two other parastatal organizations: the Nigerian Film Commission (NFC) and the Nigerian Copyright Commission. However, these have lacked strong government support and have not had the same level of impact on the industry (Miller 2010, 98–103).

The marketers' guilds

The marketers' guilds are well-organized industry gate-keepers that have long held a dominant position in the industry. They represent marketers from each of the four filmmaking groupings in Nigeria: the largest is the Igbo-dominated Film and Video Producers and Marketers Association of Nigeria (FVPMAN), followed by the Yoruba Video Film Producers and Marketers Association of Nigeria (YOVIFPMAN), the Hausa film marketers association,⁷ and the minority Congress of Edo Movie Practitioners (CEMP). Marketer Philip Dada described how in order to enter a marketers' guild, it is necessary to work as an apprentice under an established marketer for between five and seven years (personal communication, July 15, 2011). The guilds take in a new group of marketers from this pool every two to three years, and most join one of the two largest associations. They are relatively open to new entrants as long as the entrant goes through the apprenticeship programme, and it is even possible for marketers to join another ethnic group's guild: Marketer Toyin Moore, a highly entrepreneurial Yoruba exhibitor and marketer, was a member of both the main associations (Marketer Philip Dada, personal communication, July 15, 2011; Marketer Toyin Moore, personal communication, July 18, 2011). The marketers are highly clustered, especially in the four major DVD markets.

Three forms of institutional interaction

The institutional relationships will be explored through a classification of three forms of institutional interaction: conflicts over the enforcement of regulation, contestations over institutional legitimacy, and application of institutional strategies for social self-realization.

1. Conflicts over the enforcement of regulation

We shall consider both attempts by the Board to force the marketers' guilds and their members to accept the Framework, and these groups' measures to counter those attempts. This aspect of institutional relationships relate to interactions that are either incentivised or coercive, and reflect a logic of action based on interests. It therefore includes the aspects of relationships that are often examined in the value chain and other economistic literature. In order for an institution to succeed in regulatory enforcement it needs to be able to provide clear communication, to have strong surveillance capabilities and the power to apply effective sanctions (Scott 2007, 35). Each of these aspects is examined, in addition to the ways in which the structural characteristics of the Nollywood value chain shaped opportunities for regulatory enforcement.

2. Contestations over institutional legitimacy

The controversy also saw the NFVCB and the guilds fiercely contest their respective legitimacies. Suchman has defined institutional legitimacy as: ‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions’ (Suchman 1995, 574). Legitimacy represents a relationship between an institution and an observing social group and can relate to that group's perceptions of the institution's behaviours or the essence of the institution itself.

The analysis here focuses on two particularly important types of legitimacy: comprehensibility – whether the institution makes sense and has meaning; and taken-for-grantedness – whether it would be thinkable for the institution not to exist (Suchman 1995, 582). For institutional change to occur, accompanying changes must take place in both of these forms. First, the taken-for-grantedness of the existing institutional form must be undermined, in order to make an alternative form thinkable. Second, the new institutional form must be made comprehensible, so that it can be recognized as a potential substitute (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005, 59). Institutional entrepreneurs attempt to achieve such transformation through the use of ‘rhetorical strategies’. Rhetorical strategies build legitimacy by manipulating institutional logics, disconnecting and connecting old and new institutional forms to existing cultural templates (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005, 41).

Rhetorical strategies involve the use of special vocabularies, which are essential for the remoulding of actors’ perceptions of cognitive templates and for connecting them to institutional forms in new ways. Such institutional vocabularies are made up of ‘clusters of structured words … referential texts … and common metaphors’ and are deployed by distinct ‘discursive communities’ (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005, 43). In the case of the Licensing Controversy, there were two broad discursive communities, consisting of those for and against the Framework. The form of these communities correlated closely to that of ‘strategic groups’, as their composition was fluid, changing rapidly to suit micro-political interests (Olivier de Sardan 2005, 191).

Suddaby and Greenwood suggest that insight can be gained into the relationship between institutional vocabularies and underlying institutional logics by looking at how the vocabularies reflect ‘theorizations of change’. These theorizations include four varieties: historical, teleological, cosmological and ontological. The historical theorization suggests that change is part of an historical trajectory that should be honoured by contemporary society. It implies that change should be evolutionary, not involving rapid and radical breaks with a consistently unfolding tradition. Teleological change involves an idea of a ‘grand plan’, a technocratic goal towards which virtuous individuals must play a transformational role. This theorization involves a rapid and radical break from the past to reach an enlightened or modern state. The cosmological theorization argues that change is predestined, and that this is dictated by a higher power and is not decided by human agency. As this type of change does not involve a heroic individual intervention, it may by less radical than the teleological variety. Lastly, the ‘ontological theorization’ suggests that it is only logically possible for organizational forms to co-exist with forms of a like nature, and that they cannot co-exist with unlike forms (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005, 45).

The analysis of the Licensing Controversy identifies three axes of contestation along which the two discursive communities deployed rhetorical strategies: commentaries on extraction, core industry narratives and legal rights. The Board attempted to undermine the taken-for-grantedness of the guilds, accusing them of extraction from the marketers, an accusation which the guilds deployed back at the Board. The Board then attempted to build the comprehensibility of the new institutional form (the Framework) by promoting a narrative of the industry's development, which appealed strongly to a teleological theorization of change and which also had cosmological and ontological elements. The guilds responded by propagating their own narrative of the industry's creation, which appealed to the historical theorization. The Board also tried to enhance the Framework's comprehensibility by arguing for its sovereign legal right, using a cosmological argument.

3. Application of institutional strategies by marketers for social self-realization

Institutional strategies of conflict and contestation often interact with the more personalized strategies of individual actors. It is therefore important to understand the perspectives of such actors and the motivations for their actions. This concern mirrors Olivier de Sardan's desire to examine ‘processes … from the actors’ point of view’ (Olivier de Sardan 1999, 37–38). In order to address this concern it is helpful to consider a concept that has previously been analytically separate from institutional legitimacy: social self-realization. Barber argues that social self-realization is the fulfilment of one's potential to become a ‘successful social being’ (Barber 2000, 18). In the southern Nigerian context, success in independent economic activity, the accumulation of personal wealth and the achievement of marriage and a large household are core aspects of this. She justifies the central place of money in her concept by arguing that it has become ‘inseparable’ from human worth, as ‘people are constituted as members of a shared humanity by money’ (Barber 1995, 208).

In his outstanding but under-appreciated article, Lawuyi has convincingly argued that the concept of social self-realization is especially salient to the analysis of film marketers (Lawuyi 1997). The types of success encapsulated in social self-realization are also the ‘images of accumulation’ of the successful trading entrepreneur and, as such, could be described as an ‘ideology of marketing’ (Lawuyi 1997, 476–478). This ideology sits alongside others in society at large (Barber 2000, 18) but is dominant in the milieu of the market, a ‘place of selling and buying … where the self is evaluated not by its roots but by its potential; a place where mutual interest vastly exceeds shared descent as the principle of community’ (Lawuyi 1997, 479).

In the initial stages of the Licensing Controversy, the individual marketers’ quests for social self-realization often motivated them to resist licensing. The bulk of the marketers had the background, identity and mindset of independent market traders, reflected in the pioneering marketer Philip Dada's evocative characterization of them as ‘kokora an deshu’ – keys and nails traders (personal communication, July 15, 2011). They had a strong sense of independence and personal ownership of the product being traded: in response to the scenario that he might work as a regional marketer, Marketer Philip Dada objected, ‘are you telling me that I have no right to sell my product to customers out of the state?’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011) In the early stages, the marketers therefore often saw the Framework as a threat, a perception that was powerfully expressed by Official C, who compared their feelings about licensing to those of a footballer asked to wear boots for the first time:

It's as if you are playing football without boots, and somebody says, ‘take a pair of boots, so you can perform better’, but you say, ‘no, I don't want boots, I play better barefoot’. (personal communication, October 30, 2012)

Narrative of framework progression: four scenes

The three forms of interaction will be used to analyse the evolution of the Licensing Controversy. This can be divided into four stages (or scenes): those of Impasse, Realignment, Coercion/Shaming and Transformation. Although there is some sequential overlap between these scenes, they represent four distinct dynamics.

Following the approval of the Framework in February 2007, there were initially some auspicious signs that the policy would proceed according to plan. A select batch of 45 national marketers were initially licensed, followed by a further 39 soon after (Njoku 2009). These included a number of corporately backed entrants such as Gabosky Ventures, which took a national licence and was in the process of gaining a partnership with Zenithfilms (a satellite television channel) and backing from the United Bank for Africa and Union Bank (Salau 2008). Other early expressions of interest came from the South African Entertainment Company Nu Metro⁸ and the Nigerian conglomerate Transcorp (‘NFVCB's Distribution Framework’ 2009).

Early registration was also taken up by those directors and producers who were outside of the marketer community but saw it as an opportunity to enter the marketing arena and break free from the control of the marketers. These included the distinguished director Tunde Kelani, who had suffered from piracy and non-payment at the hands of the marketers (Director Tunde Kelani, personal communication, October 31, 2012). Kelani and many of his colleagues had been attempting to find an alternative distribution channel for some time, having previously come together as the Filmmakers Cooperative of Nigeria in an attempt to form their own market in Serulere (Obaseki 2008, 75–76). The vast majority of the existing marketers were not issued with licences at this time.

After this introduction, however, the initiative's development was traumatic. The first scene, Impasse, saw fierce resistance from the marketer community. This involved a rigorously fought media war culminating in a series of violent confrontations between the marketers and the NVFCB, death threats against the Director General and the arrest of some marketers. At the height of the conflict, two NFVCB representatives died in the altercations (Ajeluorou 2009 as cited in Jedlowski 2010b, 70). FVPMAN, the Igbo marketer guild, also sued the NFVCB. By the conclusion of these confrontations, it was clear that the Board could not simply exclude the marketers from the distribution arena, and it offered to moderate some of the licensing requirements to accommodate the marketers.

Scene 2 saw a Realignment of strategic groups in the controversy, with many Edo marketers and their guild choosing to support licensing. In Scene 3, Coercion/Shaming, the Board used its power to refuse to certify films in order to pressurize the marketers into licensing. As a result of this pressure, the licensing process began to accelerate. The Board publicly attempted to shame the recalcitrant marketers by publishing a list of all the licensees in national newspapers, which included some of those officially campaigning against the Framework (Iwenjora 2008). In the final scene, Transformation, large numbers of marketers were allowed to register (Gabosky cited over 2000) (Iwenjora 2008) and by July 2009, 80–90% of the existing marketer community had adopted the Framework. Despite this mass registration, many marketers had little ability or intention to fulfil the (much reduced) requirements of a national marketer, and the Board was well aware of this fact (Okogene 2009a; Miller 2010, 109).

The Board's changing approach antagonized its previous backers, including producers like Producer Obi Emelonye and Igwe Gabosky, and prospective corporate entrants such as the leading HiTV television executive Tunji Amure. Mba's former advisor Gabosky became a vocal critic, giving a series of interviews with The Guardian and the Vanguard. The Framework no longer offered any real incentive to these corporate entrants and their backers, and some members of this group felt betrayed. As Gabosky stated, ‘ … the banks were coming in to do business with the mega distributors that were to be created, maybe 10 of them, and at the end, about 100 person were to be licensed, (therefore) the banks withdrew’ (Okogene 2009b).

Structure of the analysis

In order to analyse the progression of the initiative, the three forms of interaction will be examined across the four scenes. Scene 1 and Scene 3 examine both the regulatory conflicts and legitimacy contestations, whilst Scene 2 and Scene 4 explore the application of the Board and guild strategies (in these conflicts and contestations) by the individual marketers.

In Scene 1: Impasse, we consider the first two forms of interaction. In terms of regulatory conflict, the Board lacked communication abilities, relative coercive strength, and struggled to identify an extraction point in the value chain to force the marketers to register. In this scene, the contestations over institutional legitimacy between the Board and guilds occurred along the three axes: commentaries on extraction, core industry narratives and legal rights.

In Scene 2: Realignment, the Yoruba and Igbo marketers found applications for the guilds' strategies and largely chose to eschew licensing. Conversely, the marketers in the Edo guild found applications for some of the Board's strategies and chose to support licensing. Scene 3: Coercion/Shaming saw a breakthrough for the Board in the conflict over the enforcement of regulation, as it found a point of leverage in the value chain to force more marketers to license. The scene similarly witnessed a new strategy by the Board in legitimacy contestations as it reinforced its commentaries on extraction by attacking the honour and charismatic legitimacy of the marketers’ leadership, undermining the guilds’ taken-for-grantedness. Lastly, Scene 4: Transformation, saw the largest marketer groups licensing en masse as the Board succeeded in the regulatory conflict. However, its rhetorics (which had been designed to legitimate the Framework) gave the marketers the ideological resources to identify new social self-realizing opportunities in the licensing process. The Board, on its part, also discerned fresh opportunities in the new situation, creating new, potentially powerful classifications (Figure 1 (Scenes 1–4)).

Figure 1. Diagrammatic representation of the licensing controversy.

Scene 1: impasse

Conflicts over the enforcement of regulation

In order for an institution to succeed in regulatory enforcement, it needs to be able to provide clear communication, to have strong surveillance capabilities and the power to apply effective sanctions (Scott 2007). The Board was lacking in each of these areas, which contributed to a position of great institutional weakness. This was compounded by the relative strength and solidarity of the marketer guilds.

Policy communications

There were numerous communication problems during the implementation of the Framework and there is still a haze surrounding the progression of its terms. The insurance bond became a focal point for rumours in the press and there were numerous clarifications and denials by the NFVCB on this requirement (Jedlowski 2010a). These problems reflect a lack of stability in policy, with at least four different fees being communicated in a short period.

The low level of awareness of the specifications also reflects the lack of any direct line of communication between the Board and the marketers, with all information being mediated by the guilds. Marketer Philip Dada, Marketer Lady Stella and Marketer N received no specifications from the Board itself, instead relying on information passed down by their respective guilds.

It is likely that the differences in backgrounds and educational levels between professionals like Emeka Mba and the marketers contributed to these communication problems. The marketers were marked by a low educational level. Marketer Philip Dada himself stated that there were ‘many illiterates … who don't know the difference between trading and profession’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011), and Marketer Toyin Moore stated that ‘they are not corporate people … ’ (personal communication, July 18, 2011). Mba, on the other hand, was university educated and had gained professional experience in satellite television. This chasm in mentalities, was reflected by Marketer Toyin Moore's observation that Mba should have ‘come to (the marketers') level’ (personal communication, July 18, 2011).

Surveillance and sanctioning ability

In terms of surveillance, the NFVCB lacked access to the kind of documentation necessary to know whether marketers were operating legally and whether they held the necessary licence (precisely the kind of information that the application of the Framework would have made available). Official C bemoaned the absence of this information and resulting inability to extract from the marketers, ‘If you tell the Censors’ Board you make N200 million, it means the state will come after you and collect tax, they don't want to pay tax … ’ (personal communication, October 30, 2012).

The Board also lacked the power to directly enforce the licensing requirements in a rigorous way. The structural characteristics of the Nollywood value chain made it particularly difficult for it to be regulated. In other Nigerian industries, such as petroleum or manufactured goods, there were numerous regulation or extraction points at which to exert state control, including production sites, border customs posts and internal checkpoints. In an information-based industry, such sites and channels that can be harnessed in the regulation of physical commodities are more difficult to control. Unlike the oil industry, there was no specific site of production to control. As a result of these characteristics, the NFVCB lacked any real mechanism to immediately enforce the Framework.

Solidarity and other strengths of the marketer community

The Board's structural regulatory challenges and institutional weakness were particularly troublesome because the marketers were able to wield great strength in their attempts to counter the new regulations. Marketer Philip Dada, who is a member of the YOVIFPMAN, reported that the guild was relatively well organized, and that it held monthly meetings in Lagos in which it planned co-ordinated action to flout the licensing procedure (personal communication, July 15, 2011). These included a bar on all its members registering with the Board, sophisticated delaying tactics in the official negotiations, intimidation against its leading exponents, and a legal suit against the Board.

The marketers were highly skilled at manipulating the negotiation process. They were able to employ delaying tactics to frustrate the Board and seriously reduce the policy's early momentum. Official C looked back at the use of these ‘deceitful tactics’ bitterly, complaining that the marketers' leaders deceived the Board by asking for consultation time and even employing corporate jargon such as ‘timelines’ to cause confusion. He also described how they would ask the Board to ‘give us room, three or four months, come back and work on the details of the agreement’ (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012).

The guilds used their strength to intimidate the Board and any marketers who were considering cooperating with it. Marketer B, for example, received threats for not signing petitions against the Framework (personal communication, October 31, 2012), and a Board member confirmed that Mba was receiving security protection and that the threats were contributing to his hesitation in implementing the policy (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012). Jedlowski has described that on a number of occasions the intimidation went beyond threats, with stabbings and claims of two Board fatalities, in Makurdi and Niger State (Ajeluorou 2009 as cited in Jedlowski 2010b, 70).

Contestations over institutional legitimacy

The marketers and Board fiercely attacked, defended, and counter-attacked each other's legitimacy along three axes. The Board first attacked the guilds’ taken-for-grantedness through its commentaries on extraction. It then attempted to establish the comprehensibility of the new institutional form, the Framework, through its core industry narrative and its argument for legal rights. The guilds responded with their own arguments on each of these axes.

Commentaries on extraction

Accusations of extraction against marketers

The Board and its supporters accused the guilds of illegitimate extractive and exploitative practices. Through this argument, the Board made an attempt to weaken the taken-for-grantedness of the authority of the guilds, which had been enjoying an all-powerful presence in the distribution arena. The Board's institutional vocabulary included the frequent description of the guilds as a ‘cartel’, along with many other terms implying corruption and criminality such as ‘gang’ and ‘mafioso’.

The content of the accusation related to two aspects of the guilds’ gatekeeper powers: their control over entry into the marketing community and over the film value chain. On the issue of control over entry into the marketer community, those outside the big two guilds and lower down in these guilds were particularly vocal. These groups saw in the Framework an opportunity to overturn the dominance of FVPMAN and YOVIFPMAN. Distibutor B, a leading Edo marketer, vividly described their resentment:

(the leading Igbo marketers) saw it as their birthright, they operated as a cartel, and everything had to run through them … . most of them fed fat on leading the people … but they knew the Framework was bringing independence to those people, the followership … because if you sign up for a licence, you do not have to submit to the leadership of a guild. (personal communication, October 31, 2012)

On the issue of control over the film value chain, the marketers were accused of exploiting the movies’ producers. The most common complaint was that a producer would supply his movie to a marketer on the understanding that he would receive a share of sales revenue, but the marketer would later underestimate sales and underpay. Producer Obi Emelonye, an independent producer, complained that this problem was so severe that he had not been able to turn a profit on a movie since 2004 (personal communication, July 11, 2011). The Board argued that licensing would remedy this problem by requiring the filing of written records, making marketers more accountable to the producers (and more taxable).

Other informants complained that the marketers were cheating the filmmakers through their widespread collusion in piracy.⁹ Official C used this claim to argue that they were a parasitic presence in the industry: ‘the leaders of the guilds don't even produce any movies … but they seem to be powerful, even the producers fear them, they do nothing but make money off the system’ (personal communication, October 30, 2012).

Accusations of extraction against Board and its allies

Mirroring the arguments made by the Board, the guilds argued that the Board was implementing the Framework in order to gain rent through the licence fee and bond requirements and was ‘party to the whole thing’ (Producer Obi Emelonye, personal communication, July 11, 2011). Marketer Lady Stella (an Edo marketer) accused the Board of extraction using a slightly different logic. She suggested that the fees were insufficiently high to constitute a barrier to the marketers, and they were therefore designed to extract from the marketers rather than to provide a meaningful entry test: ‘if the Board wants to limit the number, they should be using the guilds to do that, not by putting huge fees … (these fees are) just to tax the people … (the Board) just needs the 600,000 for themselves’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012).

The guilds also accused the Board of helping the producers to exploit the marketers. Marketer Philip Dada implied that the Framework came about due to the Director General coming under the influence of the producers ‘The idea is the idea of some producers who are very close to Emeka Mba’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011). Here he was referring to Yinka Ogundaisi, who first proposed the Framework, and Gabosky, who advised Mba in the early stages. These concerns reflect the guilds' long-standing suspicions of the leading producers, whom they accused of extractive practices, especially selling ‘exclusive’ distribution rights to several marketers at the same time.¹⁰

The Board's supporters responded to the guilds' accusations by suggesting that their argument was not logically consistent. They argued that the money the licence fee would raise was insignificant for the federally funded Board, with Marketer B deriding it as ‘peanuts’ (personal communication, October 31, 2012). They also argued that the marketers had misunderstood the insurance bond by incorrectly believing it to be a fee payable to the Board, and highlighted that they had properly recognized the marketers' prior contribution to the industry by reducing the licensing cost, describing it as a ‘renewal fee’ (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012).

Core industry narratives

Having attacked the legitimacy of the existing institutional structure of distribution by attempting to undermine its taken-for-grantedness, the Board tried to increase the comprehensibility of its new institutional form by putting forward a new industry narrative, the Development Narrative. This narrative, which attempted to legitimize the new form by linking it to particular theorizations of change, was challenged by the guilds, which put forward their own Creation Narrative.

The Development Narrative

The Board constructed a narrative that stressed the future development of the industry, arguing that Nollywood needed the Framework to realize its potential. It employed grandiose language to argue that the Framework was essential for the industry to ‘reach the next level’ and fulfil its status as the ‘third best movie industry in the world’ (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012). Through this rhetoric, the Industry Development Narrative attempted to legitimate the Framework by appealing to three theorizations of change: primarily teleological, but also cosmological and ontological.

The central argument of the Development Narrative connected the Framework to a strongly teleological theory of change. It emphasized the necessity of an integrated distribution structure in order to raise finance, thereby taking advantage of the recent development of the Nigerian financial sector:

the entire essence (of licensing) was to guarantee the capital structure of the licencees … , so if you are engaging the banks or other financiers, they should be able to know where is the limit of your liability … in Nigeria, no bank will finance a movie project or distribution because there is no proof of capitalization … without it there can be no connectivity with the international investors. (Marketer B, personal communication, October 31, 2012)

They also argued that an integrated distribution structure was the most effective way to combat piracy, as a collaborative release strategy across all regions simultaneously would crowd out the pirates. This aspect of the argument was based on a view that piracy was a direct consequence of the disorganization of the marketers, and that the pirates were simply filling a gap created by the poor supply (Producer Obi Emelonye, personal communication, July 11, 2011). These arguments reflect all of the main features of a teleological theorization of change, including: the ‘grand vision’ of the integrated, modern, investor friendly industry, the radical break from past practices, and the agency of the Director General and exceptional foresighted marketers in overcoming the conservatism of the marketer community.

A secondary strand of the Development Narrative connected the Framework to cosmological and ontological theorizations of change. The Board invoked the sense of collective pride felt following the publicity given to the claim by UNESCO that Nollywood had become the second largest film industry in the world.¹¹ The report was widely referenced in both the international and Nigerian press, and there was a real sense of optimism, with informants across the spectrum showing a sense of pride in this achievement. The Board argued that due to this recognition Nigeria now had a new industry that was worth developing, and that the Framework was the only way to capitalize on the achievement ‘ … when Nigeria has found itself in the map of the countries in the world that are making movies, we started asking ourselves after this, what next? Where do we go from here?’ (Salau 2008). The invoking of this collective sense of pride also recast the emergence of Nollywood as a national achievement, as opposed to one claimed exclusively by the marketer community.

This rhetoric expresses several of the features of a cosmological theorization of change. The approach to the Framework as an unstoppable force of globalization reflects the cosmological theorization that ‘change is part of the orderly evolution of the universe, according to the immutable laws of economics’ (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005, 46). The Board's suggestion that Nollywood's success had come from external factors like ‘international recognition’ and being ‘pigeon holed’ (Iwenjora 2008), evokes this all-powerful, transcendental controlling force. The ultimate powerlessness of human agents in this inevitable process is directly asserted by Gabosky, ‘we are now the third biggest film industry in the world, whether we like it or not!’

Lastly, the Development Narrative also reflects the ontological theorization of change. The Board implied that it should be formalized in a way befitting an internationally recognized industry, and that there was a disjuncture between the international status Nollywood had achieved and its informal structure,

(Mba) was very determined that it was the best thing to do if Nigeria movies must fit into the pigeon hole of third best movie production countries after the US and India … (Iwenjora 2008)

Other Framework supporters expressed incredulity that ‘illiterate market traders’ could co-exist with corporate entities in one organizational structure. These statements clearly employ the ontological theorization by arguing that the informal structure of the traditional marketers cannot logically fit into a ‘pigeon hole’ which is otherwise inhabited by such an unlike element as a modern international-standard bureaucracy.

Creation narrative

All of the guild supporters used a very specific institutional vocabulary to justify their perspective on the controversy. They repeatedly referred to the role played by the marketer community in the birth and early growth of Nollywood. This relentless recounting of a particular narrative of the creation of the industry is typified by this description by the marketer Don Pedro Obaseki:

Kenneth Nnebue (an Igbo trader) took the TV superstars … .and shot Living in Bondage … the people who sold video-cassettes then became distributors, as they had the necessary equipment for the distribution of copies … Then more and more people got involved with making films. (Obaseki 2008, 74)

Constantly recapitulating this story, the guilds emphasized that as the creators of the industry, the marketers ‘have all the credit – they made the gamble’ (Marketer Philip Dada). They therefore felt a sense of ownership of the industry as their creation. They argued, on the basis of this narrative, that the Board's policy was illegitimate because it was acting against the interests of the fathers of the industry. This argument was by far the most common of any put forward, with Official C's concise recapitulation of their argument, ‘we created Nollywood from nothing, so why tell us how to do it now?’ (personal communication, October 30, 2012). They used Mba's apparent disregard for this narrative to vilify him as a usurper with such statements as, ‘who is this little boy (Mba) who crawled out of this little hole?’ These arguments reflect their attempts to frame their narrative squarely in the historical theorization of change. They appealed to the marketers' early role in the industry in order to accuse the board of not honouring the past and constantly reference a particularly important heroic historical figure (Nnebue).

A specific feature of the guild's institutional vocabulary was the frequent use of referential language through the deployment of aphorisms. Barber suggests that aphorisms are ‘homeric formulae’ used to invoke the entire moral outlook associated with a tradition, and as such are a type of quotation, ‘rather than being merely uttered, they are cited’. The guilds used aphorism in exactly this way, giving more power to their arguments by linking them through quotation to the historical theorization (Barber 1999). ‘He who pays the piper, calls the tune’ was recited on a number of occasions in support of the Creation Narrative (Marketer Philip Dada, personal communication, July 15, 2011). This alludes to the initial ‘gamble’ the marketers made and the subsequent toil, and the implicit ownership and right to make decisions that these brought. Marketer Philip Dada also employed aphorism with powerful effect, stating, ‘The soup that the husband does not eat, the wife will not cook such a soup’ (personal communication, April 18, 2012). Here he is suggesting that if a person (or institution) is playing a supportive role in the relationship, she (or it) cannot dictate what that support entails.

Through the Development Narrative, the Board had appealed to a teleological theory of change, whereby it was justified in taking any action that would benefit the future development of the industry, even if such action involved excluding current industry actors. In the words of Executive Tunji Amure, it was time for the marketers to ‘take a back seat … (because) Nollywood needs to grow beyond them’ (personal communication, July 14, 2011). In the historical theorization of the guilds' Creation Narrative, such an argument would be impossible as the industry was inseparable from its creators. The two narratives therefore reflected a difference between theorizing the industry as constituted by its current actors on the one hand; and as a more abstract, impersonal entity on the other.

Alternative creation narratives

In response to the power of the guilds' Creation Narrative, the supporters of the Framework put forward their own alternative creation narratives appealing to the historical theorization of change. Official C stressed the role of the Yoruba travelling theatres in the advent of the industry, ‘Nollywood as it is known was started by the Igbo people … but it started as what we call the travelling theatres, the same in the North’ (personal communication, October 30, 2012). Similarly, others emphasized the existence of celluloid production prior to Nollywood, and the continuity in the involvement of some leading directors since that time, ‘(The Igbo marketers) were the earliest people, but people predated, preceded them, people like Kelani shot on celluloid … ’ (Marketer B, personal communication, October 31, 2012) Producer Obi Emelonye even suggested that as a former satellite television executive, the Director General had a founding role, ‘(Emeka Mba) was part of the initial gamble in the industry – he had great belief in the films’ (personal communication, July 11, 2011), which mirrors the previously quoted argument by the marketers that they ‘made the gamble’ to start the industry.

The Board employed an appropriate institutional vocabulary to promote these creation narratives, using their own aphorisms to appeal to alternative strands of tradition. For example, they deployed a counter-aphorism to Marketer Philip Dada's (about the responsibility of a wife to a husband), ‘You cannot reject the food prepared for you by your wife without tasting it. You have to open it at least to see how palatable it is’ (Nigeriafilms.com, 7 March 2009); here they remain in the same register as Marketer Philip Dada, but suggest there is a tradition that you cannot reject out of hand a gift designed to help you.

Contestations over legal rights

In addition to the Development Narrative, the Board also attempted to build the Framework's comprehensibility through making arguments for its own legal rights, which appealed to the cosmological theorization of change. The guilds fiercely contested these arguments, arguing against the Board's legal rights with reference to the historical theorization.

Assertion of legal rights by the Board

The Board argued that as a government body, it had the legal right to regulate the film industry, and the marketers had to comply with whatever it decided. The institutional vocabulary used to articulate this message appealed to a technocratic logic and was authoritarian and uncompromising in its assertion of the Board's sovereign legitimacy. Official C stated, ‘I can wish for anything I like, I'm free, but the government will say that's OK, but this is the way we want it to be, we say you do it this way or you leave’ (personal communication, October 30, 2012). Marketer B had similar sentiments, ‘you cannot question the mandate of the Board, it is a legal mandate, it has a right to regulate distribution’ (personal communication, October 31, 2012).

The vocabulary reflects a particular type of cosmological theorization in which sovereignty itself is all-powerful and highly extraverted. This conception of the state as possessing the legal power of sovereign command is similar to that outlined by Pierre Englebert (Englebert 2009, 60–65). Englebert argues that international recognition endows state institutions with the power of legal command, and that this comprises three types of power. These are the power of ‘regulation and control’, the ‘power of declaration … to name things in and out of existence … the power to say the rule’, and the ‘power of appropriation’, including taxation (Englebert 2009, 65–75). These three aspects of legal command were encompassed in the Board's statements, as it asserted the right to regulate the industry, to declare who was and who was not a marketer, and to demand a fee from anyone who wanted a licence in order to operate as one.

Contested by guilds

The guilds reacted with outrage to the Board's argument, contesting its legal rights on two grounds. The first was that the marketers were beyond the legal authority of the state, and had other rights that were of greater power than the law. This argument appealed to the historical theorization of change: as the marketers had created the industry before the state had become involved, the industry preceded the law and therefore they could not be subject to it. Marketer B illustrated this view, ‘the endeavor started before the law was created so it's like this is my territory, and the government has no right to do anything … ’ (personal communication, October 31, 2012). In this way, the use of aphorisms (which assert an alternative set of laws) were a way of appealing to a time before the creation of the law, and therefore to challenge the law's legitimacy in the Nollywood context. The argument was also made that as the industry had not received any government support, the state could not expect to have any right to make laws, ‘when Emeka came with the Framework, people said “where are you coming from? Has the government provided infrastructure? Do we have electricity? Do we have light? Did you give us support?”’ (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012).

The second objection was that although the marketers might in principle be accountable to the state, the Board was extending beyond its legal remit and was not following due process. This argument accepted the premise of an all-powerful sovereign legitimacy, in line with the cosmological view, but implied that the Board was overeaching its allotted authority. Marketer Philip Dada espoused this point, ‘How does Emeka have the right to tell you how to distribute your film, he is just supposed to be [sic] … film classification, not telling me how to distribute my film’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011). Many guild members shared Marketer Philip Dada's objections and the Registered Trustees of the Movie Makers and Marketers Association entered a nine-count law suit against the Board at the Federal High Court in Enugu (Akpovi-Esade 2008a). This comprised counts questioning the Board's mandate to introduce and enforce the policy, complaints that they had not been sufficiently consulted in its formulation; and several charges hinting at corruption. The latter included claims that the cost of the insurance bond was excessive, that the arrest and detention of some marketers who had spoken against the Framework was illegal, and that the arrest of guild members on charges of piracy was as an intimidation tactic to force them to license. In addition to this guild action, around 50 marketers issued their own private suits against the Board (Miller 2010, 109).

Scene 2: realignment

At the end of Scene 1, the Board hesitated to implement the policy as it struggled in the regulatory conflict and achieved mixed results in the contestations over legitimation. Its initial response to the impasse was to put forward a more moderate set of licensing requirements. This included the lowering of some of the threshold requirements to accommodate those who would struggle to meet the original conditions. The Board had already made some minor concessions in early 2007, soon after the launch of the policy, including the relaxation of the insurance bond requirement, which was reduced from N50 million to N30 million (Jedlowski 2010b, 69; Obiaya 2011, 259). More radical concessions were now given: the licence fee was reduced from N500,000 to N40,000 for the national marketers (‘Censors Board Announces Licensees,’ 2008; Njoku 2008), and the insurance bond rules were further relaxed for existing marketers, so that the guilds could indemnify their members, instead of the marketers having to take out the insurance bond individually (Obiaya 2011, 264). The marketers’ responses to the impasse varied as the different groups found their own applications for the institutional strategies.

Yoruba and Igbo marketers finding application in guilds' strategies: opposing licensing

At this stage, the majority of Igbo and Yoruba marketers stood steadfastly against the initiative. It is likely that the Igbo marketers opposed licensing with particularly great zeal as they considered it a threat to their dominant position in the market. Certainly, the most virulent opposition to the measures came from the Igbo group: Emeka Mba, for example, reported that the death threats he was receiving were coming from the South-Eastern part of the country (‘I Get Death Threats on the Phone,’ 2007).

These marketers strongly supported the guilds' Creation Narrative as it was compatible with their own strategies of social self-realization. Many felt they had personally contributed to the early growth of Nollywood, such as Marketer A, who claimed to be the first person to sell Nollywood films in any London market, and Marketer Philip Dada, who claimed to have had the first exclusive distribution rights for a Nollywood movie in the UK (personal communication, July 15, 2011).

These marketers also found application for the guilds’ commentaries on extraction. They used these to turn the Framework into a focal point for resentment about their general condition of hardship and thus into a useful repository of blame. This complex of resentments extended beyond the Framework to include all their concerns, directed towards an all-responsible state. Marketer N explained that marketers were speaking to the newspapers because they wanted to ‘cry out’, so that the outside world ‘will hear what (we) are going through … ’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012). Marketer Philip Dada, illustrated a similar viewpoint with the proverb, ‘he who wears the shoes knows where it pinches’, which he explained in terms of ‘feeling the pain’: ‘I know how difficult it is … I'm the one that feeling the pain … The marketers feel the pain, Censors Board does not feel the pain’ (personal communication, April 18, 2012).

Edo marketers finding application in the Board's strategies: support for licensing

Many Edo marketers found greater application for the Board's strategies, and their guild (CEMP) soon came to an agreement with the Board for its members to license (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012; Marketer B, personal communication, October 31, 2012; Marketer Lady Stella, personal communication, April 22, 2012; Marketer N, personal communication, April 22, 2012). They utilized the Board's accusation of extraction against the guilds, as it corroborated their perception that the leadership of the big two guilds were engaging in exploitative practices. These included gatekeeper powers over entry into the marketer community, dominance of national distribution, and the use of their position to get preferential treatment from the Board. Edo marketer Lady Stella, for example, complained that ‘when the Igbo films comes out, they will censor the Igbo films first, then the Benin film’ (Lady Stella, personal communication, April 22, 2012). In addition, the Creation Narrative was less useful for this group because they entered the industry far later than the original Igbo traders.¹²

The Edo marketers also utilized the Board's legal rights arguments. They had an especially strong belief in federal legitimacy, possibly due to the protection it offered from the majority groupings, with several showing confidence in the social contract. Marketer Lady Stella, for example, articulated her acceptance of such a relationship, ‘now (the marketers) have registered, they've paid their tax … they should be recognized and get the help needed from the government’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012). Some offered a more qualified acceptance: that the authority was valid up to a point, but not if the Board was asking for too much.

The controversy as intra-ethnic and occupational

Despite the above observations, it would be misleading to characterize the controversy as inter-ethnic. Although the Igbo-dominated FVPMAN was by far the most active guild resisting the Framework, it is interesting to note that the Board itself was also Igbo-dominated. The controversy could therefore be characterized as having an intra-Igbo element; indeed, Mba was accused of ‘betraying his own people’ on a number of occasions.¹³ Moreover, leading Board members made particularly pointed remarks about the Igbo marketers. Mba, for example, singled out ‘the marketers in Onitsha market who have continued to behave as if they are above the law’.

Occupational identity was also an important factor shaping attitudes to institutional strategies, with marketers showing a striking degree of understanding (if not solidarity) with those from other groups. Many Edo marketers had sympathy for the Creation Narrative, which was most strongly propagated by FVPMAN. Similarly, there was a suspicion amongst the Yoruba and Igbo marketer rank and file that the Edo marketers were correct in articulating that the leaderships of their own guilds were exploitative (Marketer D). A more speculative example of an occupationally linked attitude was the taken-for-grantedness that regulation in general (not explicitly by the state) was the natural way of organizing an industry. Marketer Lady Stella stated, ‘everybody cannot just go out from his house and go and start filming … there should be a regulation guiding the industries … ’ Such thinking may reflect a guild ethos valuing high entry barriers, indeed Lady Stella worried that if the Board put the entry requirement ‘too low, everyone can afford it … (every Tom,) Dick and Harry will join’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012).

Scene 3: coercion/shaming

NFVCB success in conflict over the enforcement of regulation

Despite the Board's inability to directly enforce the Framework, it was able to use indirect regulative means to wage a war of attrition against the marketers. The marketers who failed to license were refused certification by the Board for new films, which put them under increasing financial pressure in the months following the introduction of the Framework. The recalcitrant marketers described the drying up of income during this period. Marketer N described the situation, ‘after months, they (still) didn't come to a compromise, everybody started talking, because they had a lot of bills to pay’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012). The marketers were continuing to produce films but they were not able to release them (due to the lack of certification), causing a build-up of unreleased films and a severe cash crisis. This pressure possibly explains the increasingly desperate and virulent attacks on the Board.

We can consider this pattern of regulation in terms of the structural opportunity provided by the Nollywood value chain. As we have seen, it is very difficult to police either the reproduction or movement of the films but it is comparatively easy to identify the source of their origination – it is much easier to ban a film outright than to try to control its reproduction or circulation. This pattern is the opposite of physical commodities, whose circulation can be controlled at checkpoints but whose origins are harder to trace. Therefore the Nollywood value chain offers greater opportunity for regulation at the beginning (upstream) of the value chain than in distribution directly. As a result, the policy of refusing to certify films was ultimately successful, but only after a time lag, until its effects were felt downstream.

Parallel to this economic pressure, the Board succeeded in influencing the legal process, bogging down the marketers’ legal suit. At the height of the crisis, in August 2008, the case was finally heard at the Federal High Court, but the Board's council delayed the case by arguing that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear it and spuriously asserted that that they needed time to file a ‘Memorandum of Appearance’. Through these delaying tactics, they secured an adjournment for several months (Akpovi-Esade 2008a).

As part of this strategy, the Board also managed to enlist the law-enforcement agencies to harass the recalcitrant marketers (Akpovi-Esade 2008a). A number of marketers who were both public opponents of the Framework and plaintiffs in the court case were victims of police raids and arrested on the pretext of piracy. These included both the former chairman and then current vice-chairman of FVPMAN. On 24 July 2008, just two weeks before the court hearing, their shops were raided by police and they were taken to Makurdi in Benue State where they were held in custody for four days before being arraigned by the Area Court. Although the Board publicly denied involvement in these arrests, there is evidence of interference: the arrested men reported that the police at first drove them in the direction of Abuja, telling them that the orders came ‘from above’ (Iwenjora 2008).

The Board's increasingly effective mobilization of coercive force was in part made possible by a rapprochement with state-level institutions. In 2006, Mba had already formulated a Shared Responsibility Plan (SRP), which would involve the partitioning of functions between the NFVCB and the individual state censors' boards (Obiaya 2011, 244). The general outline of the breakdown of these partitions was that the NFVCB would make policy decisions, whilst the state bodies would be limited to enforcement measures, receiving a share of income derived through such measures. It was only in September 2008 that the first SRP was finally signed with the LSFVCB (Obiaya 2011, 245). In return for a 60% share of licensing revenues, the Board gained the support of the wealthy state's enforcement machinery, including ‘trucks … the uniformed men and … the mobile courts’ (Obiaya 2011, 245). This constituted a huge addition to the NFVCB's own resources.¹⁴

Marketers licensing

As a result of the pressure placed on the marketers and the moderation of the requirements, the rate of licensing began to accelerate during 2008. Although the Igbo and Yoruba guilds had initially been united against the Framework under the auspices of CONGA (the Coalition of Nollywood Guilds and Associations), the Yoruba association chose at this point to accept the reduced requirements and negotiated a specific accommodation regarding the insurance bond (Iwenjora 2008). By the summer of 2008, FVPMAN was the last grouping to still be holding out. In an interview in August 2008, Mba confirmed that marketers across the south-west, north, and ‘south–south’ (the Edos) were all now in compliance, but that ‘the marketers in Onitsha market’ were yet to agree terms (Akpovi-Esade 2008b). Despite this, some members of the recalcitrant guild had begun to register in secret, an issue that became of great significance in the next part of the scene.

Shaming

The Board sought to take advantage of the acceleration of licensing by using it to extend its commentary on extraction, emphatically diminishing the taken-for-granted nature of FVPMAN, the most powerful and only remaining recalcitrant guild. The centrepiece of its media offensive was the placing of a 12-page advertorial in a number of leading newspapers ‘exposing’ all those marketers who had registered (Iwenjora 2008). This publication revealed that many leading guild figures who had publicly spoken against the Framework had in fact already registered.

Leading marketers who were publicly accused of hypocrisy included Mrs Biodun Ibitola, who had been vehemently opposed to the Framework as chairman of CONGA (the organization that had been campaigning against the Framework) and Emmanuel Isikaku, the president of FVPMAN and vice-chairman of CONGA. Emeka Mba was particularly vocal in his attacks on Isikaku, pointing to an interview Isikaku gave to the NFVCB's own newsletter in which he praised the Framework because it would ‘sanitise the industry’ at the same time as he was actively campaigning against it (Iwenjora 2008).

The publication of the advertorial represented a two-sided offensive against FVPMAN. First, it sought to shame the guild leaders, threatening their personal honour and the ‘charismatic legitimacy’ of their guilds.¹⁵ This is reflected in the language used by leading exponents of the Framework. Gabosky suggested that ‘(Isikaku) is not leading his people well … a true leader must be capable of steering the ship of his people to the right course’ (Iwenjora 2008). Marketer T similarly suggested that ‘it tells you that the leadership they were providing wasn't real because if you don't agree and want others to go in your direction then you should totally have nothing to do with such policy’.

Second, it highlighted the contrast between FVPMAN's official hostility to the Framework with the fact that many of its rank and file members had actually registered. The Board could therefore argue that the leaders neither represented their members' points of view nor had control over them. Gabosky stated, ‘if over 2000 companies are authorised to market and distribute movie products in Nigeria, then we are winning this battle’ (Iwenjora 2008). Official C highlighted that the publication proved that there was in fact ‘a group’ in FVPMAN that was in favour of the Framework, but which was not being represented by the leadership (personal communication, October 30, 2012).

In order to understand the behaviour of the marketers, we can reflect that covertly registering whilst publicly continuing to support their guilds may have been the least shameful course of action. Marketer Lady Stella vividly explained the pressures facing the marketers who were not able to release their films,

if you come to borrow money from me … are you coming to tell me, oh sorry I couldn't produce that film because they say we have to register … Are you STUPID? Will you go to register to get my money! (personal communication, April 22, 2012)

The quote illustrates that if a marketer lent money to a marketer friend to make a movie, it would be a point of honour for that friend to do everything possible to repay the debt, including getting a licence if necessary. There was, therefore, a high level of sympathy for licensees from their fellow marketers, who understood that they needed to register out of economic necessity as meeting their financial commitments was their primary responsibility

they don't want to betray the union or the business … but (they) have already put in their money … and they have to register so they can be free to do their business but I assure you they don't have intention of doing it. (Marketer Lady Stella, personal communication, April 22, 2012)

By placing the advertorial, the Board was thus exploiting the tension between the individual marketer's need to publicly support the collective association on one hand and his personal financial commitments on the other, effectively the difference between being a good marketer and being a good member of a marketers' guild. This conflicted perception of the honourable course of action can also be described with reference to the competing influences of social and practical norms (Olivier de Sardan 2008). Social norms were of overriding importance on a verbal level: the marketers had a responsibility to show loyalty to their guilds. On the other hand, practical norms were of greater importance in choosing and evaluating actions: they had to do everything possible to avoid the shame of failing to meet their financial commitments.

The Board achieved success with this policy, managing to divide the anti-licensing FVPMAN. The publication of the advertorial sparked conflict within this group, with reports of a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations and the ‘excommunication’ of the exposed leaders (Iwenjora 2008). The fear of further shaming led many previously vocal marketers to shy away from talking in public about the matter, out of fear that they would ‘get the fire’ (Iwenjora 2008). This weakening of anti-Framework marketer solidarity damaged this group's position within FVPMAN, and by the beginning of 2009 the guild had finally come to an agreement with the Board and agreed for its members to license.

Scene 4: transformation

Use of licensing as a social self-realizing strategy by the marketers

Having reached a stage where all of the guilds had now approved licensing (and at which FVPMAN could no longer prevent it), there was a deluge of licence applications, so that by the end of 2008 over a thousand marketers now held licences (Iwenjora 2008). Despite this rapid take-up there was no sign of the Framework having a discernible effect on the way the films were actually distributed. This pattern of licensing cannot be fully explained by the factors outlined in Coercion/Shaming. Many marketers were now registering for licences that they did not officially require, and which qualified them for functions they were unable to fulfill. Small-scale marketers who only needed regional or local licences, registered for the more expensive national licences, and Gabosky complained that people who were not even releasing movies were allowed to attain the licence (Nigeriafilms.com, 7 March 2009). These developments can be understood by the Board's inability to fully legitimate the Framework and failure to offer technical support; and by the marketers' realization that there was no real threat of the remoulding and their subsequent reconceptualization of the Framework as an opportunity. The Board, for its part, also found a way to benefit from the developments. It succeeded in creating a new set of classifications equivalent to those it had used so successfully to create its earlier narratives for the industry.

Failure of remoulding

In the introduction, the two-stage nature of the initiative was highlighted: it was designed to first reconstitute the marketer community, filtering out most of the existing marketers, and then to remould the sanctioned pool of marketers into a national distribution structure. Following the ultimate licensing of many of the marketers, however, it became clear that the remoulding side of the project was making very little headway. As we have seen, the newly sanctioned group of marketers was little different in membership from the pre-existing marketer community. The remoulding aspect of the Framework, when applied to this group of marketers, was in effect a decree turning some into national marketers and gluing together some of the smaller-level marketers into an organization of regional-level marketers under them.

Remoulding failed for two reasons. First, although the Board had achieved significant success in delegitimizing the guilds through the commentaries on extraction, it had not achieved an equivalent breakthrough in legitimizing the Framework, so the marketers had limited ideological incentive to co-operate. Although the guild's taken-for-grantedness was compromised, the Framework's own comprehensibility (let alone taken-for-grantedness) had never been fully established. The impasse over the legitimacy of the core industry narrative and legal rights remained, which meant that the Framework vision was not shared by the bulk of the marketers.

Second, the policy offered very little support or sanction to assist the upgrading of the marketers' capabilities and failed to provide the resources and professional infrastructure needed to comply with the Framework. The marketers' background as independent market traders made it difficult to incorporate them into a national distribution system. They lacked the managerial capabilities needed to be part of a large organization and also the trust to operate effectively with other members of the network. In response to the possibility that he might have to send discs to another regional marketer in a neighbouring state Marketer M replied, ‘what about if we do not do business together? … so I have to take the risk of sending my products to him? What if … I'm unable to get my money.’ Another problem was that there was still a strong sense of personal ownership of the product being traded: Marketer Philip Dada was indignant at the possibility of losing the ‘right to sell my product’ outside of his state (personal communication, July 15, 2011). This sentiment indicates that in addition to lacking the ‘know how’ needed to be part of an organization, the marketers also lacked the ‘know why’, the acceptance of the principles that underpin hierarchically organized firm activity (Oyelaran-Oyeyinka 2006, 49–54).

Similarly, the marketers lacked commercial capabilities: there was an unwillingness to engage in business practices suitable for maximizing profit in an intellectual property industry. This is reflected in Marketer Philip Dada's observation that they saw the industry as ‘just trading … like selling bread … . they don't see it as a business’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011). They were therefore not used to keeping written records and often looked to recoup their investment in the shortest possible time, often as little as two weeks (Producer Obi Emelonye, personal communication, July 11, 2011).

The Board failed to take any measures to remedy this lack of capabilities or the resulting problems. It did not offer a training programme to help the marketers increase the managerial and commercial capabilities, essential for functioning within such a large and complex organization. Although the Framework demanded that national marketers have a presence in all regions, it did not provide support to the larger marketers to achieve such a level of reach (far beyond the existing trading networks). As Marketer M implied with the statement, ‘what if we do not do business together?’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011), such personalized systems were not well suited to systematic coverage.

There was also no investment in a guarantee fund (or salary provision) for the traders who had not yet built up the requisite level of trust with their counterparts to send them stock. For example, Marketer Philip Dada emphasized that his network consisted of independent traders, not his employees. He was therefore unwilling to risk sending his discs to another regional trader he had not worked with before, stating that ‘so I have to take the risk sending my products to them … not in Nigeria … what if … I'm unable to get my money? Will the Censors Board pay me my money?’ (Marketer Philip Dada, personal communication, July 15, 2011).

Similarly, the Board did not attempt to deal with the issue of the high levels of vertical integration in the value chain. As Marketer Philip Dada highlighted, he was responsible for funding many of the films he was distributing and therefore was the intellectual property owner as well as the marketer. It therefore did not make sense to him to fully integrate his distribution in a larger organization, as he would lose control over his own property: ‘if you are a national distributor … would you expect me to give my film to you? … a film that I put down my money on?’ (personal communication, July 15, 2011).

Opportunities for marketers

The Board's inability to assist the marketers paradoxically contributed to their confidence that the threat was not as potent as they had earlier feared. Due to the failure of remoulding, they thus became sufficiently encouraged to look for wider opportunities offered by licensing, safe in the knowledge that they would not have to conform to the Board's original intentions. They saw the potential to appropriate the Board's legitimation strategies, reworking the theories of change for use in their own strategies to attain social self-realization. These appropriations included: using the licences as a way to catch the reflected glow of sovereign legitimacy, as auguries of future professional success and as material objects evocative of educational achievement.

Reflection of sovereign legitimacy

The legitimacy that the Board had constructed through its legal rights arguments was reflected onto the marketers when they received its recognition through licensing. In this sense, legitimation is a mutual process as the marketers needed to view the Board as legitimate in order for its licence to bestow vertical honour (in Iliffe's sense) on them. This recalls Englebert's view of state legitimacy as being transferable, with a ‘domestic currency’ enabling it to trickle down (Englebert 2009, 80–89), and also Lund's concept of the recognition of individuals' property rights and state authority as being mutual processes (Lund 2006). The marketer application of the Board's legal rights argument retains its original cosmological logic as it is consistent with the flow of legitimacy from an ultimate, higher authority. It also retains a form of the ontological theorization, although the argument is inverted: instead of saying that the marketer must be separate from the state because of its ‘unlikeness’, it suggests that engaging with the state will result in its transformation into a (state-)like entity.

This strategy of gaining reflected legitimacy from the state was common amongst the Edo marketers, who recognized the federal authority as having a particularly high degree of legitimacy. Marketers Lady Stella, N and B considered the Board to be a legitimate institution and valued being well regarded by it. Marketer Lady Stella described how licensing was a way to achieve this regard, ‘to be a good citizen, you need to pay your tax, so to be a good member of the film industries, you have to register’ (Lady Stella, personal communication, April 22, 2012). She also highlighted the extraverted dimension of sovereign legitimacy: suggesting that state recognition was essential for a marketer with an international outlook to gain a sense of honour ‘If (a marketer) is going to America to shoot a film, he needs to show the certificate, then maybe (the Americans’) minds being interested, saying “Ohhh! … wow”’.

Auguries of future professional success

The marketers also used the licences as auguries for future professional success, by licensing for scales of distribution that were larger than immediately needed (taking national or regional licences). Marketer Lady Stella typified the informants' responses when she explained that small-scale marketers chose to pay for the national licence because, ‘today they are small, tomorrow they may be bigger’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012). This may have been a pragmatic investment in anticipation of business growth; but Lady Stella suggests it goes beyond this, that there is a moral virtue in foreseeing success, ‘you have to think big, no matter who you are’ (personal communication, April 22, 2012).

To interpret these statements, we may consider Lawuyi's emphasis on the importance of the concept of potentiality to the marketers. Potentiality is the way social self-realization is imagined by people who are still a long way from achieving this goal. It is of particular relevance to the film marketers, who are often at a stage where their professional lives are still ‘in the making and whose future is not really certain’ and at an age at which they suffer from ‘mid-life career anxieties’ (Lawuyi 1997, 478). According to Barber, such fears are often resolved through identification with one of the popular images of the aspiring entrepreneur: the trader who will fulfil his potential due both to his industriousness and destiny and who is able to identify signs of this future self-realization (which contrasts with the another archetype: the trader whose poverty stems from idleness, engages in occult practices for immediate gain, and has no long-term prospects).¹⁶ The presence of an augury is thus potentially important for one's self-image. The marketers therefore may have licensed because they saw such bureaucratic trappings as signs of the big companies that they hoped they were destined to become. Such an application of the Board's strategy mirrors the cosmological appeal of the Development Narrative, which suggests that the industry growth was part of a predestined economic process. The marketers rescaled this theorization form the macroeconomic level to that of their individual life-trajectories.

Material objects evocative of educational achievement

The licence certificates had a value to the marketers as material objects evocative of educational achievement, and as such they could be used as symbols of success. Barber has argued that the objects and structures of education, including certificates, have long been used as signs of social self-realization. She illustrated this in her description of the importance apprentices placed on the certificates they received when they were freed, that their greatest concern was that they ‘got a certificate to prove it’ (Barber 2000, 85).

Although none of the marketers had actually framed their certificates, great care was often taken in keeping and handling them. Marketer Lady Stella described how she kept hers in a special place and valued it so highly that she would not even let her own teenage daughter touch it. She illustrated her sense that its attainment was a specifically educational achievement by insisting that it should be seen as a type of degree:

Marketer Lady Stella: To me, it's as good as a having a degree: when you go to university, you can't get your degree straight away, so (the licence) is a degree!

AB: So it is a bit like a qualification?

Marketer Lady Stella: It's not ‘a bit’, it is a qualification! (personal communication, April 22, 2012)

Types of relationship between institutional legitimation strategies and marketer application of these strategies

This analysis has revealed some relationships between institutional strategies and marketer applications of these strategies. These relationships can be classified into four types, forming a kind of spectrum, including: coincidence, correspondence, redeployment, and recycling. At one end, coincidence, the institutional arguments were engaged with by the marketers in more or less the same terms in which they had originally been used. For example, in the commentaries on extraction, both the institutions and the individual marketers were referring directly to economic exploitation of the marketers. In the second form of relationship, correspondence, the marketers applied the institutional discourse in an analogous way. They took the narrative about the Igbo marketers who created the industry in the early 1990s, and applied it to their own personal achievements in the industry, retaining the narrative's historical theorization. A third type of relationship, redeployment, saw arguments being detached from their context and transferred, through transactional relations, to a different set of actors. For instance, the Board's arguments for its own sovereign legal right were appropriated by seeing the licence as a carrier of that right, so endowing the licensee with sovereign legitimacy on purchase of the licence. This transferability was reflected in the way the ontological theorization was modified: from the assumption of the impossibility of unlike elements co-existing to the belief that their co-existence would resolve their unlikeness. Lastly, at the most extreme end, recycling, the institutional strategies could be plundered for pieces of meaning, to the point that they were little more than shells, resulting in an apparent disconnect with their original form. This was the case in the application of the material licences, originally cogs in the surveillance and coercive apparatus, as objects bestowing educational qualification.

Opportunities for the Board

The Board was also able to find new uses for the transformed licensing process. It claimed success from the high take-up of licences, with Mba stating, ‘To quantify the success that the distribution framework has recorded in terms of percentage, I would say, it's almost 100 per cent!’ (Njoku 2008). Such a comment could be dismissed as mere face-saving, and there was indeed an element of disappointment within the Board, as Official C privately admitted (personal communication, October 30, 2012). However, the Board did see value in the new classifications and the power of these classifications to affect change in the industry. Mba hinted at this when he stated,

I keep saying to people, this is the reason why we have called it a framework, it is simply what it is in language: a framework … the framework we have set out is the basis upon which a model for the future can be built. (Obiaya 2011, 303)

It envisaged that these classifications would eventually aid the implementation of the framework, as Mba suggested with his comment, ‘these registrees do not realize they are more accountable now (by agreeing to be classified within the bureaucracy)’ (Miller 2010, 109). As we shall see in the epilogue, this consequence may now be coming to pass. The Board could also use classifications in more unexpected ways, such as contributing to narratives about the industry like the ones explored in the introduction. We may be beginning to see such a process with the Board's dissemination in both the public and academic spheres (Obiaya 2011, 294; NFVCB 2013) of statistics based on the classification of marketers.

Conclusion and policy implications

This article has explored the changing relationships between the NFVCB, the industry guilds and the individual marketers through the course of the Licensing Controversy. The forms of interactions between these groups included conflicts over the enforcement of regulation, contestations over institutional legitimacy and the individual marketers’ applications of these institutional strategies in their struggles for social self-realization.

Before progressing to some more substantive reflections, we summarize the four scenes of the controversy. In Scene 1, Impasse, the Board struggled with communication, surveillance and enforcement and faced legal suits and physical threats. It also contested legitimacy with the guilds along three axes. It first attacked the guilds’ taken-for-grantedness though commentaries on extraction; before attempting to enhance the framework's comprehensibility through its Development Narrative and legal rights argument (all of which the guilds contested with its Creation Narrative and other arguments). Scene 2 saw a Realignment of strategic groups, as many Edo marketers licensed, utilizing the Board's arguments in their own strategies. In Scene 3, Coercion/Shaming, the Board's refusal to certify new films began to squeeze the marketers, accelerating uptake. The Board then further undermined the guilds’ legitimacy by renewing its commentary on extraction, publicly shaming the recalcitrant marketers by publishing a list of licensees, which included anti-Framework campaigners. This stimulated the collapse of opposition to licensing with the accession of the Igbo guild. In Scene 4, Transformation, the Board was unable to remould the marketers into the desired structure, due to its failure to fully legitimate the Framework and lack of any professional support to the marketers. Emboldened, the marketers found opportunities to appropriate the Board's regulatory and rhetorical legitimating strategies through their own uses of the licences. A typology of these relationships between institutional strategies and marketer applications was created, including: coincidence, correspondence, redeployment, and recycling. The Board also found new opportunities in the unexpected situation, using it to produce classifications that it had the ability to exploit.

Through the New Distribution Licensing Framework, the NFVCB aimed to effectively filter the participants in the marketing arena and to remould the newly constituted pool of marketers. It failed in the first of these objectives (due to the reduced licensing requirements not performing any real filtering function), and lacked the capacity to make a serious attempt at the second. The combination of success in forcing the formal take-up of licences, inconclusive deployment of legitimizing arguments and failure to provide professional support gave the marketers the opportunity and ideological resources for appropriation. Although this might appear to suggest that the marketers gained at the expense of the Board's policy, the Board similarly benefited in surprising ways, as it constructed the sort of classifications that it had previously used to great effect.

Despite the multitude of problems faced during the implementation of the Framework, the vision of a national, centralized distribution system, structured in a way to appeal to the reorganized Nigerian financial sector remains an alluring one. If Official C is serious in his desire to resurrect the initiative, the Board faces the decision of whether it again attempts to exclude the bulk of the current marketers (to allow new entrants to replace them), or whether it accepts their presence and takes a new approach to remould them into the new structure.

If the Board attempts the latter policy, it would need to play a far more supportive role than before, by helping the marketers to upgrade their capabilities and offering a guarantee fund to mitigate the lack of trust. However, such a policy lacks support from all sides. The Board itself is not receptive to the idea: when I suggested such a role to Official C, he responded that it did not ‘come within our mandate, our mandate is “this is the rules”’ (personal communication, October 30, 2012). The largest marketer groupings are also against receiving support from a state of which they are suspicious and are reluctant to restructure themselves in a way that may be at odds with their conception of social self-realization. Moreover, the Edo marketers were against a supportive policy. They felt that it would serve to entrench the dominant position of those in the two main guilds. For them, subsidizing those marketers currently controlling the industry would be a reward for people who had achieved their industry position through exploitation (Marketer B, personal communication, October 31, 2012).

Due to these challenges, the possibility of encouraging the entry of new actors into the distribution arena and the exit of the current marketers appears a far more promising route towards the desired transformation. However, the strategy of directly excluding the currently dominant group through licensing was clearly very difficult to implement. It runs the risk of causing a huge polarization in the industry and a shift of focus by all sides onto conflict, instead of the development of the industry. Official C conceded this point, ‘the whole purpose of the censors Board is to help regulate … we are not supposed to be in conflict with the marketers’ (Official C, personal communication, October 30, 2012). It therefore seems that more subtle methods of regulating participation would be helpful.

There is already a great deal of economic pressure on the existing marketers, who have been suffering from both decreasing sales volumes and prices for nearly a decade. Moreover, the traditional marketer-based distribution system is beginning to be overtaken by corporate marketers and other distribution technologies, including satellite television, online distribution, and cinema multiplexes. If the government were able to provide increased incentives to these new corporate actors, such as tax breaks for them and their investors (as the Indian government did for Bollywood in 1998) (Lorenzen and Taeube 2007), it could accelerate the current trend. If such a policy were pursued, the current marketers could be gainfully employed at another stage in the value chain. They could move upstream to work as agents, taking advantage of their industry connections. More promising, perhaps, would be to move downstream, to focus on DVD retail, taking advantage of their existing capabilities and familiarity with local markets.¹⁷

Epilogue: a fifth scene?

Nearly four years of dormancy followed the apparent conclusion of the Licensing Controversy. The Board's failure to argue convincingly for the legitimacy of the Framework and to offer sufficient support to the marketers appeared to have dashed the prospect of Mba's vision coming to fruition. However, even if rhetorical strategies ostensibly fall short, they sometimes do achieve enough to fulfil goals in the longer term, even if indirectly,

Once shifts in cognitive legitimacy have been articulated, it is difficult to revert to previous logics. Like a stretched balloon, contested institutional logics are reluctant to assume their previous shape.

The Board's strategies, though not fully imbuing the Framework with either comprehensibility or taken-for-grantedness, did stimulate an increased interest in the general concept of a national distribution structure.

In the summer of 2012, a major development occurred: the Bank of Industry (BOI) announced that Gabosky Ventures had been awarded N1.8bn ($11.4 m) from the Special Entertainment Fund to create a privately owned national distribution system (Obiaya 2011, 300). The company is owned by Gabosky, a leading Nollywood producer who was one of the leading early exponents of the original Framework. With this award from the BOI, Gabosky was able to form a subsidiary, G-Media, which was officially launched at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Lagos on 2 December 2013 (Abodunrin 2013).

The connections between the new venture and the original Framework are so strong that it constitutes a partial privatization of the existing system. In planning the initiative, Gabosky co-operated with Yinka Ogundaisi, who was none other than the author of the original Framework. In close parallel to the original framework, the new plan is to create a national structure, with 25 national stores, 30 regional marketers and 4000 local-level marketers. Even the terminology is inherited from the Framework, with its ‘national’, ‘regional’ and ‘community’ levels (Alli 2013).

The G-Media initiative explicitly integrates the existing Framework within its structures by making the holding of an NFVCB licence the main qualification for inclusion in the system. (Obiaya 2011, 300) It therefore has the character of a ‘twilight institution’ in Christian Lund's sense, as it is has an ambiguous status in relation to the Nigerian state, neither fully public nor private (Lund 2006, 701). This is reflected in the curious abstractions used to describe its relation to the original Framework: ‘a structure … which all interested national/regional distributors can use to fully activate and operate their licences towards leading the industry … ’ (Obiaya 2011, 300). The clarifications by Gabosky and Ogundaisi have only compounded this ambiguity by stating that although the company is private, it aims to provide a national service for all marketers and as such is a ‘national institution’ and that it ‘will operate in the public domain’ (Abodunrin 2013).

It must be cautioned that G-Media is only launching as this article goes to press, and there is of course the possibility that it will not fulfil its grand ambitions. Indeed, there have been several such apparently well-conceived private initiatives since around the time of the original framework. However, Gabosky's is the first to receive significant state support and to incorporate the licensing structure. The launch of the company therefore appears to constitute the rebirth of the framework, and the start of Scene 5: Privatization.

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 2006, 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 2010, 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 2009, 75)

11. Jedlowski (2010a) 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 (2011, 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 2005).

16. For example Barber (1982), ‘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).