Nigeria, The Arts, And The Critic

(Temidayo Ahanmisi)--A significant number of us would agree that the Arts are altogether not serving Nigeria beyond momentary entertainment.

If we only knew a bit of history we would be appalled and indignant at how much our artists have taken from us in terms of human development and social evolution. This aside the money.

Many Nigerians, by the unfortunate virtue of not having grown up in a critical culture as most now in their late 30s and beyond did, are hampered in understanding that art is a veritable tool for cultural disruption and the motivation of the critical aspects of the zeitgeist culture necessary to force social change for sociocultural emancipation in any society.

When you grow up watching art imitate the worst of life, you think art should serve only one function - to validate mutual perfidies, and to pay homage to brigandage while the artist dances for his supper.

This is partly why a lot of Nigerians tend to become hostile at the whiff of criticism especially of an artist they prefer. It's a kind of indulgent patronage bestowed on a favourite pet.

If your fare is Nollywood movies like Azonto babes, Blackberry babes, (Nigerian) Spider Girl, you would of course bristle when you hear such atrocities being dissected for the immoral socioeconomic criminality they honestly are.

To the average Nigerian, you cannot criticise or critique a movie unless:

Beauty, Brian, and Talent, by Stella Damasus

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was already 5pm and I still had one more homework to finish with my 9-year-old daughter. My phone rang a few times and as I saw the name of the caller, I didn’t pick it up.

My daughter noticed my constant glances at the clock and said to me “mummy you can go you know. It’s Friday and I don’t have to submit this in school till Monday”.

I really didn’t want to leave the house but she went into my room and brought the invitation card to me. “Mummy you have to go because this person has been calling for this event for the past one month.” I took the invitation card from her and looked at it again; it was for a movie premiere and a lot of hype had been done about this movie. It was the rave of the moment and everyone who mattered in showbiz was going to be at this movie premiere. Well, everyone but me.

“Mummy I know that look. You have to be there”. So I jumped in the shower, looked through my wardrobe and got the first thing that my hands could grab. A simple but beautiful dress…comfortable for the evening.

As I arrived at the Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, the car park was jam-packed and my driver had issues with parking. “This movie must be amazing,” I thought to myself. As I stepped into the atrium at the galleria, I was greeted by a swarm of pressmen. Flashing cameras, microphones and more questions than my brain could process were coming at me like bullets. The red carpet was packed as I saw colleagues, good friends, not-so-good friends, producers and ‘everybody’ looking like a million dollars. “I must have stumbled onto the red carpet at the Oscars,” I thought.

"Thank God Entertainers Lost Their Primaries," Etcetera

My dear entertainers who just lost out in your quest for public office, can you please gbe enu e soun so that we can concentrate on the election at hand? Despite your claims, we all know the reasons why you sought public office in the first place. So many Nigerians have hurt their knees in praying to God to rid this nation of political miscreants and people with selfish motives in seeking public offices. So the fact that you all lost your primaries is a gargantuan sign that the system does not see you as worthy representatives of the Nigerian youths. 

You are the reasons why the youths are only being regarded as the future in a time like this when we are supposed to be the present. Why is it surprising to you that you lost in the primaries? The system has been analytically taking notes of your below the par exploits even within the madhouse we call entertainment industry. Don’t you get it, because you are in the sacred ministry of receiving brown envelopes doesn’t make you qualified to administer or make laws.

Nigeria's Celebrities and the Rave for 'Packaging'

On a quiet January day, a Medview Airlines plane was preparing to take-off from Terminal 2 of the

Murtala Mohammed Airport, Lagos, destination, Abuja. Passengers were seated, but the business-class section was conspicuously empty. On recognizing actress Eniola Badmus who was sitting contentedly in economy class, one of the air hostesses asked her to move over as it were, to ‘higher ground’. Nearby, a budding actress (we want the name na) who by a freak coincidence, had been cast in Obi Emelonye’s Last Flight to Abuja was watching quietly. She then politely beckoned the hostess and asked to follow suit for a short period to – believe it or not – take photos there. Stunned, the airline staff agreed, well aware that the images were going to be used to create the illusion of an arrival in the big league.

There are no prizes for guessing correctly where the images will end and how they will be framed, complete with a matching hashtag – #FirstClassThings maybe – for the viewing pleasure of social media users.

“It was shocking”, says Lorenzo Menakaya, also an actor, who was aboard the same flight. “I just took one look at her and knew there was only one place the pictures would end up – Instagram”.

Nigeria's Entertainment Industry and the Bane of Piracy

Movie lovers hunt for the latest Nigerian films in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, and Guangzhou's Little Africa; Nigerian songs play in clubs from London to Kuala Lumpur. But the lion's share of the profit goes to pirates who didn't invest a penny in studio time or camera equipment.

"By some estimates, for every legitimate [movie DVD] copy that is sold by the producer, another five to 10 copies are sold by pirates," said a World Bank study last year. Music CDs are also mass-replicated, leading to losses valued at hundreds of millions of dollars for the film and music industries.

Developing countries have increasingly been looking to creative goods as a source of revenue, according to the study. Asian economies accounted for more than three-quarters of total exports of creative goods from the global south. In Latin America and the Caribbean, exports of creative goods more than doubled – from £2.1bn to $5.3bn – between 1996 and 2005. But Africa, which accounts for less than 1% of creative goods exports, has been left behind.