Each time the swashbuckling Minister of Communications and
Information (read Re-branding), Mrs Dora Akunyili shares a podium with
Nollywood practitioners or adventurers, she takes her time to give Nollywood a
good dressing down. She cuts the picture of a stringent headmistress cautioning
errant school children.
Daily Triumph Newspaper of November 2009 carried just an
ounce of Minister Akunyili’s peppered vitriol against the forces aligned
against her mission to rescue Nigeria’s image. She blamed Nollywood for Nigeria’s
poor image and charged her to tell our own stories. She said the same thing few
weeks into her appointment as Minister at an interactive workshop with
Nollywood practitioners in Lagos. And I suspect, she says it everyday. She’s
after all a Minister; all they do is say things.
Had Dora Akunyili not being a Minister, she might have
understood the inanity of her assertion but as I fear the cordial distance
Nigerian public officials maintain with reality has a way of deodorising the
embarrassing stench of empty reason. But that is hardly surprising as it
emanates from a Ministry where trite ideas are routinely granted a new lease
and executed with zeal that borders on mania.
