We have fallen in love with the idea of the “African Creative Explosion.” It makes for great headlines. It’s undeniably true that our culture – our films, our music, our design – has become one of the most vital exports in the global marketplace. We are a cultural superpower.
Our culture has crept on the whole world and is being celebrated, but we are seeing headwinds, and there is a dangerous complacency in that narrative. If we keep celebrating the output without fixing the inputs, we are setting ourselves up for a ceiling that we may not be able to break through.
Working with NECLive and the team at Frontyard, we went into the field to talk to 377 working creatives – not the superstars who have already found a way, but the engine room of the industry.
The people who build the actual work across eight sectors. The data we got back wasn’t about a lack of creativity, vision or skill. It was a report card on our infrastructure. The product is world-class; the plumbing? Effectively broken.
Here is the reality of the industry today, stripped of all the hype.
1. You can’t broadcast without a signal
We asked our respondents to rank their biggest day-to-day hurdles. The answer wasn’t “funding” or “piracy” or “regulation.” It was power and the internet.
I think we all can agree on one fact: you cannot build a digital economy on a generator. When we lose billions to bad power – and the World Bank data is clear that we are – we create an economic blockade that affects everyone. If your studio can’t render, or your team can’t upload, you are already out of the game before you start. Every government initiative that doesn’t prioritise basic power and broadband as “creative infrastructure” is building on sand.
2. The “Administration Tax” is killing our margins
This was perhaps the most sobering statistic in the report: 83% of our creatives lose more than 10% of their productive time every single week to routine administrative tasks. They aren’t creating; they are chasing payments, managing logistics, or fighting over contracts.
In a mature media or tech business, those are back-office functions. In Nigeria, they are a tax on the creator. If we could just standardise our contracts and automate the payment rails, we would effectively double our national creative output without needing a single extra Naira of investment. We definitely need more capital and all the resources you can think of. But it might all come to nought if we do not develop better systems that are built on resilient infrastructure.
3. We built the culture, but we forgot the cashier
When we looked at the barriers to exporting our work, the picture became crystal clear. The friction isn’t the quality of the content. It’s the payment stack. 57% of our export hurdles come down to payment processing and FX issues (you can see this easily with the social media conversations around getting paid and the amount of effort invested in VPNs).
We are globally relevant, but we are commercially locked out. We have created a world-class IP, but we haven’t built the “cashier” to bring the money home. We are the ones doing the heavy lifting, yet we are the ones struggling to collect the bill. That is a structural failure, with profound consequences for practitioners, their backers, and the national economy.
4. The AI gap is all about the bill
There is a lot of talk about AI training and re-skilling. That matters, but it’s missing the bigger picture. When we asked creatives why they weren’t using AI, the barrier wasn’t “I don’t know how.” It was “I can’t afford the subscription.” We are creating a two-tier industry where the best tools are only for the top 1%. If we don’t democratize access, we are just widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
What must we do next?
We have the ambition. The government’s $100 billion GDP target for 2030 is bold, but big headline funds won’t reach the freelancer in Abeokuta or the studio in Aba. Capital needs to be calibrated to how creative projects actually earn, not tied up in the bank orthodoxy of collateral that doesn’t exist.
The path forward is unglamorous. It won’t trend on X, and it won’t win a popularity contest. But we need to:
- Prioritise power: Make it non-negotiable for creative districts.
- Fix the financial rails: Build an FX corridor specifically for creative services.
- Standardise the work: We need a common code of practice for contracts so we stop wasting 50% of our time on budget disputes.
- Register the talent: We need a functioning pipeline, so when a big project lands, we actually know where to find the editors, animators, and engineers to staff it.
We have spent enough years shouting about how good our talent is. That was never the question. The question now is whether we are finally prepared to build the boring, essential machinery that lets that talent get paid, scale, and stay; the boring machinery that turns a beloved culture into a sustainable industry. And it’s precisely the work Frontyard exists to do: building the rails, the financing and the structure beneath the noise. More on that later.
This article was written by John Ugbe, Founder of Frontyard Group. Views expressed in this article are strictly the writer’s and do not represent Neusroom’s
The post OPINION: The Culture is World-Class. The Plumbing? Not Yet -by John Ugbe appeared first on Nigerian Entertainment Today.
from Nigerian Entertainment Today https://ift.tt/IPaKXBM
via IFTTT
Post a Comment