His name rings a bell in entertainment circles. He is a front-liner and one of the pioneers of Nollywood, an industry that has brought Nigeria enormous fame and wealth. He is a businessman, a prolific filmmaker and content distributor. He is the owner of Gabosky Films and G-Media Limited, two outfits that are doing excellent job of filmmaking and distribution, respectively. But one thing that has continued to agitate the mind of GAB OKOYE, popularly known as Igwe Gabosky, is the menace of piracy that has held the creative industry down for too long. CHUKS OLUIGBO, assistant editor, paid Igwe Gabosky a visit in his office recently and had a most revealing chat with this amiable but tough-talking gentleman. The chat centred on piracy, industry and government’s efforts at curbing the menace, government support for the industry, among other issues. Excerpts:
One major challenge facing the creative industry in the country is piracy. As a key player in the industry, could you tell us the enormity of this problem?
I describe the piracy situation in the creative industry – that is, the entertainment industry, which is Nollywood, the music industry, and even creative books – as intellectual terrorism. It is like terrorists attacking the creative sector. The intellectual property owners are losing a lot of money and resources. Some of them are even migrating to a clime that has some kind of security for them, where piracy is checkmated or where there are some sort of deterrent measures against pirates. Some are no longer producing. If only you knew what pirates have done to Tunde Kelani! Some of us that borrowed money from the Bank of Industry to do distribution have been frustrated out of the business. Some CD plants have shut down. The foreigners have left; the Nigerians have shut down because the pirates are now importing empty CDs and printing in their shops, they are no more going to the plants and the plants have no business to do. And even some of us that go to the plants, when you finish you can’t even pay the plant owners. They have seen that there is no business and they are shutting down. That is the cumulative effect of piracy on our industry.
In Nigeria, too much emphasis is placed on oil even when it has been confirmed that there is no more hope there, and we have identified over the years through research that the last hope for Nigeria is the creative industry. But still there is a lukewarm attitude on the part of our government to pay particular attention to the creative industry. The industry has been suffering; the creative people themselves have been dropping their art and creativity and facing other businesses. And for some of them it has become so late. We lost some of our colleagues to frustration. They could no longer fend for themselves. Imagine a situation where your children are calling you a failure, asking you why you had to bring them into this world to suffer when you know you cannot fend for them!
When you travel to other countries, like America, you find out that entertainment industry people are superrich. And when we go for international conferences or festivals, they will always host them in five-star or seven-star hotels and Americans, Europeans and even the Chinese will get all the rooms booked up, but we will move away from that zone and go to other zones looking for the cheapest hotels where we can even be two in a room because we are impoverished. And why is that we are impoverished? We produce some of the best content in the world, but here, pirates will take up a movie that you have not released or that is in cinema and release it into the market in the full glare of the security forces or the regulatory bodies, and nobody does anything. You are aware of the challenges faced by Yewande Sadiku with ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’; it was released by pirates. Ay’s ‘30 Days in Atlanta’, Kunle Afolayan’s ‘October 1’ – all these movies were released by pirates. While the owners were still planning how to release them, the movies were all over the streets, and they are still hawking the movies, and nobody arrested any single person. I know how much I lost because I was to distribute some of those movies. After packaging and doing everything, the films were on the streets, released by pirates.
Could you quantify what the industry is losing to piracy annually?
It is billions of naira. You see, when I read reports that Nollywood contributes $600 billion annually, I laugh. To start with, how many movies are we releasing in a month? What are the average sales of a movie? Have you factored in the damage the pirates are doing. I am a producer Gabosky Films, Kunle Afolayan is a producer Golden Effects, Okechukwu Ogunjiofor is Videosonic, Zeb Ejiro is Zeb Ejiro Productions, and we do films, 10 different companies, 10 different titles; the pirates will gather these 10 films and put them in one CD, and Nigerians will not ask, how do you want to give these 10 companies back their money? Is there any way these 10 companies came together and decided to put their movies in one CD? The answer is no. The same thing happens to the musicians. The owner of the CD is the pirate. And there won’t be any name or address on the CD, you can’t trace it to any company, but Nigerians are still buying because we don’t have watchdogs in the country. The Consumer Protection Council is just an agency to collect allocation from government. Who are they protecting? Restive youths are forming different groups to destroy things in parts of the country, engage in pipeline vandalism, engage in kidnapping. These are young talents. The entertainment industry employs directly more than one million and indirectly more than two million Nigerians. There is no profession we don’t employ. Some of these people are the ones that are now getting loose. Our office here used to be full of activities, but even when I borrow money now to produce, where am I going to sell? Look at cinemas that are in every country. America has more than 8,000, India has more than 4,000, but in Nigeria you don’t have up to 20 cinema houses. So even if you decide to release in cinemas, how many of them do you have? Imagine if the Nigerian government says every local government should build one cinema to serve as recreation centres, that would be 774 cinema houses, and assuming we have four or five screens in each, multiply that by 774. By the time you drop your film in cinema, you make your money, the industry is rejuvenated, employment is created, and the youths are engaged and empowered. When we were growing up we read about how Europeans came to Africa and forcefully took our people into slavery, but now Nigerians go to these countries by themselves and beg them to enslave them; they cross the same rivers again and die in thousands. It is time for African leaders to think.
What has been the government’s role in combating this crime?
Nigeria is not doing anything about this intellectual terrorism. You can imagine if the Federal Government were to look away and leave only one individual, maybe the governor of Borno State, to fight Boko Haram! That is the kind of scenario we face with piracy. You can see that President Buhari, even with all the nation’s resources available to him, cannot fight terrorism alone; he is travelling abroad seeking for help and people are complaining and asking why he is travelling up and down. If his house is not on fire, a man like Buhari will say to hell with foreign trips or the international community; he will sit down here and manage his country. But the man is sitting on a keg of gunpowder and that is why he is moving around. But coming to intellectual terrorism, they are leaving people like me alone to go to Alaba and fight thousands of criminals that are hibernating there committing the crime.
So, the earlier the government gets serious the better. It is not about going round and making noise that you have discovered that the creative industry is our next hope to replace oil. Yes, you have seen the contribution of the industry to our GDP, you have seen how much the entertainment industry can contribute to our economy, but if they have identified 10 percent, for example, that is only the one they can account for. The larger chunk of the industry’s contribution to GDP is in the hands of pirates and you cannot account for that. The pirates are not accountable to anybody, they don’t pay tax. When I encrypt my film for N40, print my inlets and buy my jackets and still have to pay the content owner, the pirates don’t have to pay anybody; they don’t go for encryption, they use their computer in their room or in their shop to manufacture or replicate the CD, they use HP printers to print their inlets, they use everything in their shop and they have nobody to pay for the content. So when I come out and say my overhead cost is N300, they are ready to sell for N100. And law enforcement agents are not helping matters. The other day at Maryland I saw those who were pirating my movie, but when I came down from the vehicle to confront them, the man that was buying was a policeman. I told him the copy he was buying was a pirated copy, and he asked me, ‘Are you saying it won’t play in my system?’ It led to a quarrel and the policeman threatened to arrest me for insulting him. When I saw I wasn’t making headway, I quietly left the scene before. So, that’s the problem. The man is ignorant, and even when he knows, he doesn’t want to do anything because he thinks I want to prevent him from buying a cheap copy. It all boils down to the rottenness of the society.
So if we can get the government’s assistance, it would help us. Lai Mohammed has promised us that he is going to do something, but the present government is doing more talking than action. IGP Arase is willing to help us but I think he is financially constrained because to fight piracy involves money. But he is the only one that pirates have not contributed money to go and visit. I have evidence that these pirates contributed money to go and ‘greet’ the previous IGPs before Arase, and none of them bothered to ask what the ‘greeting’ was all about. It is a very difficult situation we are in.
Sometime ago there were reports about using online distribution channels as a means of curbing piracy. How has this worked?
It works in foreign lands where you can get mobile data at an affordable rate, where you can use internet to do whatever you want to do. But not in Nigeria. For almost a month now there has been no power supply in this my office area, not even to charge my phone. There is always network failure. The data cost is very high. Let’s say you buy my movie for, say, N500, that is a two-hour film that you can take home and watch, if you put a little fuel in your generator you can watch the movie pleasurably with your family. But if you want to watch the film online, you buy N3,500 data and still you can’t have complete access to watch the movie because of poor network. So, next time you’d prefer to look for the movie and go home and watch it. So, internet distribution of content is still for very few people. If you release a movie today many people will still ask you, where can we get this your movie to buy? If you tell them it’s on the internet, they will look at you as a misfit.
Have there been efforts from within the industry itself to fight piracy?
There have been individual efforts and there have been initiatives by a few people, but the only constraint is finance. I liken intellectual terrorism to Boko Haram. While I am going to Alaba all alone or calling some people to help me combat piracy, Buhari is calling the whole world to help him fight Boko Haram. So with the efforts we are putting in, I believe if we get complementary efforts from the government, we will conquer the pirates. But the fact is that there has not been a concerted effort by the government to help the industry. The pirates are celebrating. We have identified them even to the communities where they come from. There is a community in Ebonyi State that has decided that all the youths that are coming out from that place are coming to Lagos to do piracy. They have agreed that they won’t do any other business in Lagos. Last month I arrested five of them from the same community, Onicha Igboeze.
So if government wants to address piracy, they know the few of us they will call together and say, what do we do? In the next two days [this interview was conducted on Tuesday, May 10] we are going to Abuja to see the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and the Comptroller-General of Customs. These people are pivotal to the curbing of piracy in the country. The director-general of Nigerian Copyright Commission is leading the initiative for us to see whether we can save the industry, save creativity and save our youths that are trying to go into negative activities. We are hoping that IGP Arase will listen to us because we know he has listening ears and he also has zero tolerance for these kinds of negative attitudes.
What has the Copyright Commission been doing all this while?
We came into this industry when there was no Copyright Commission and there was no Censors Board. My first movie, ‘Nneka the Pretty Serpent’, was not censored. That film was done in 1993 while Censors Board came through an Act of 1994. We fought for Censors Board to come into place just as we are fighting now to have a MOPICON, a council to regulate the industry. Now you created a Copyright Commission, just make a visit to any of their offices and you see that this people are not given any subvention to go and combat crime. So, the commission is just a regulatory body that has been established, appointment given to people, but there is no money for them to function. Unlike an agency like NAFDAC which generates money internally, pays some part to the government and withholds the one with which to do its work, the commission does not generate revenue internally, and that is why it is handicapped. Even if you create a task force for them, they can’t generate money to maintain this task force.
Talking about government support, the entertainment industry enjoyed some bit of goodwill from the previous administration of President Goodluck Jonathan. Has the present administration shown the same kind of support?
The truth is that the administration of Goodluck Jonathan was in love with the entertainment industry. He showed reasonable interest and reasonable commitment in the creative industry. He donated some money which he called grant, directed the financial institutions to give us loans, and for entertainment industry anywhere to thrive you have to get loans, equity and grants. We have not manifested reasonable revenue-generating capacity to attract investors. It is only when you demonstrate some reasonable capacity for return on investment that you will woo investors to donate money or bring money for equity contribution or buy equity in your business. The Jonathan administration brought in loans, but because the industry people have been impoverished, they didn’t have collateral to access the loan. He brought grants and we met and agreed that the grants would be in three components – capacity building, production, and distribution. We found out that our problem was lack of capacity building; there were no training and retraining opportunities. The other thing was lack of good content, quality production. In this area we found out that the mainstream creative industry people were downing tools because of lack of funding and as a result of their being impoverished by pirates. And we found out also that we lacked a distribution model and proper auditable, virile and visible distribution structure. We started with capacity building and many people went abroad for training. Some went to Colorado, some to California and so on. That grant was well utilised because people who benefitted learnt a lot, came back here and were ready for production. Production grant was released and majority went to locations and produced quality content. When they were on production we started asking for the distribution fund so that we would empower the distributors to ensure that we guarantee return on investment. Then election came and the government said until after the elections when a new government is formed. But the new government came in and refused to release the fund. They are playing politics with the fund and that is one of the reasons the industry is in a comatose state. The people that went for training came back and produced films but the films they produced cannot be distributed because the distributors are impoverished and can’t do anything. The pirates have taken over. Are you going to release your films to the pirates? The answer is no. So the industry is in coma and the government is busy holding seminars and lectures on how best to engage Nigerians, empower the youths and ensure that the creative industry is thriving. How can it thrive when that grant was seized at the Ministry of Finance? As the national president of Government Licensed Distributors, I have led three groups to the Minister of Finance to explain to her the need to release that fund to the distributors so that they would be energised to go to work. Distribution will drive the content, distributors will ensure that producers go back to locations, producers will engage other creative industry people, actors, crew members, and there will be a robust industry.
The other day four groups came from America to talk about distribution and I told them to take their movies back because I don’t want to be accused as a criminal; there is no market out there. And they are all Nigerians. I asked them why they are now producing in America, and they asked me why they should produce in Nigeria. They have grants in America. Some of them are producing in South Africa. Kunle Afolayan and I went to Kwazulu Natal and they were begging him to produce in South Africa, that they would give him grant. But coming back here, even the one that government brought out, they are holding on to it. People went and borrowed money, committed themselves, suffered to produce movies, and then they seized the money for distribution. Why then are you prosecuting people for 419 or for diverting fund meant for purchase of arms to fight Boko Haram when you are diverting the fund meant for the creative industry to thrive? And why are you organising seminars and conferences asking how best to get the creative industry working?
What is the way forward for the industry?
The way forward is what we are trying to do. Without a proper distribution structure the industry is comatose. If you want to make a movie, the first thing you do is get a distributor to give you a minimum guarantee that there will be return on investment. The distributor will like to know those who are going to star in the movie, what camera you are going to use, who is directing. He wants to make sure that technically your film is okay. That is after he has known your storyline. But once a good story is well produced and the technical quality is okay, then my job as a distributor is to find a way to return your investment so that you can pay back those you borrowed from and go back to location. Without that distribution, nothing will happen. Distribution is facing a lot of challenges, all of them traceable to one thing – piracy. Once piracy is addressed, there will be a robust distribution system, content will improve, producers will be empowered and energised, they will go back to locations and engage thousands of Nigerians and you have a robust industry. This is an industry that made Nigeria known in international circles. There is no country of the world that I have travelled to that they don’t enjoy Nollywood films. And we say we are looking for alternative to oil. Is it not just lip service we are paying? At the peak of the militancy in Niger Delta, when President Jonathan called some of us, we told him to gather these youths and tell them that they would become actors and stars and watch them drop their weapons. He agreed with us and brought money and said we should go and train them. We coached them and they were so happy; most of them joined the entertainment industry. People like seeing themselves on TV screens. It makes them feel useful.
Finally, who is Chief Gab Okoye?
I am a filmmaker and a businessman. Before filmmaking I was already a businessman dealing in electronics. It was electronics that brought about filmmaking. When there was structural adjustment and nobody could bring out money to import foreign films or foreign filmmaking materials, Nigerians began to look inwards. Okechukwu Ogunjiofor called some of us in electronics and said we could do something. So we started with VHS, and since then we have made a lot of progress.
I started with ‘Nneka the Pretty Serpent’ in 1993. In 1994 I did ‘Nneka the Pretty Serpent 2’, then thereafter I did what they now call the first African epic, ‘The Battle of Musanga’. I am not the kind of filmmaker that does one film every month. I choose my jobs, that is why most of my films are still relevant in the market. After that I did ‘Beyond the Vow’ which caused a row between me and the Catholic secretariat. Then I did ‘Banned in Nigeria’ which I have not brought out because of piracy. I am still a filmmaker. I’m married with four children, three girls and one boy. When I saw the lacuna in the distribution network, I sought loan from the Bank of Industry and established G-Media, which I call the best distribution structure for physical content in Nigeria and even West Africa. And I still hope to keep pursuing my passion which is creativity, and I believe that with the proper advocacy, the government will listen and see that entertainment industry is still a low-hanging fruit that they can leverage on and get the youths properly engaged and empowered.
I have been pivotal to the formation of most of the associations in Nollywood. I was part of the group that formed the Association of Movie Producers (AMP). I have been part of efforts to have one umbrella association, which we call Conference of Motion Picture Practitioners of Nigeria (CMPPN). I have been a member of ANCOP, Association of Nollywood Core Producers; I am chairman of its Board of Trustees. I am one of the three Nigerian representatives in the world body for filmmaking, FIAF, which has only Nigeria and Egypt as African members. I am also a member of the Board of Directors of Nigerian Moviemakers Hall of Fame. I’m a member of the Board of Trustees of different guilds in Nollywood, and so on. The attempt by government to regulate the industry through the Censors Board created a new distribution framework and got distributors licensed. By that initiative I am the national president of Government Licensed Distributors. I don’t want to delve into the politics of the industry. I am there to help in creating structures that will enable practitioners function optimally. When any association is getting too political, I draw back. If I want to do politics I’d better go into the mainstream, join a political party and play real politics.
CHUKS OLUIGBO
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
