Nollywood Not Structured To Feed Practitioners – Sam Dede

Nollywood star, Dr Sam Dede, has called for workable policy that will enable all practitioners in the creative industry to have full benefits of their intellectual input.
Dede made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sidelines of a one-day workshop organised for Theatre Art students of University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT), Choba.
The workshop had the theme: “Legal Perspective to Management of Creative Industry.”
According to him, the Nollywood industry is not well organised to enable the practitioners to reap the full benefits of their works.
“The creative industry in Nigeria is still probably not structured in a way that puts money in the pocket of the practitioners.
“There is a need for restructuring of the industry to ensure that all the crew members involved in film production benefit from their intellectual input in every project.
“We need to rejig the system in such a manner that practitioners, including those crew members that we overlook and ignore, get something reasonable from a movie project.
Dede, a lecturer in the Department of Theatre Art, UNIPORT, called on industry players and stakeholders to come together and see how they could improve remuneration in the industry.
He lamented that the nation’s poor economy had had adverse effects on the film industry.
“Consequently, there is a big drop in the number of productions; even the low budget ones are also finding it difficult to survive.
“We are hopeful however that government will steer the economy to growth, so that young people (theatre art students) can be part of the production process when they graduate.
“The energy and creativity of the students is huge.
“Now imagine when they leave school and cannot find a place to expand all that creativity; that becomes a loss to the country,” he said.
Addressing the students earlier, Mr Rockson Igelige, a legal practitioner, called on government to ensure enforcement of the Copyright Act, to enable art creators benefit from their work.
The industry, Igelige said, had potential to generate huge revenue for government as well as create job opportunity for millions of Nigerians.
“So, the industry cannot be fixed alone by the producers, Government’s encouragement from go through the Nigeria Copyright Commission (NCC) is needed.
“NCC, which is the regulatory body that is supposed to police the industry to prevent copyright infringements, is underfunded.
“Aside this, there are lots of international treaties that Nigeria has not domesticated when it comes to intellectual property matters, such as trademark, among others,” he noted.
Igelige advised that the proposed Nigerian Copyright Bill before the National Assembly should be updated to meet global standards.
According to him, crude oil would someday dry up but creative art would remain, hence the need for government to pay more attention to the entertainment industry.
The legal practitioner further urged government to come up with more suitable policies and programmes to improve the sector.
“We need to improve Nigerian music and movies because that is the only aspect that has given the country a good name,” he said.