Entertainment industry has employed more than agriculture in Nigeria —Pretty Okafor, PMAN president

The president of the Performing Musicians Association of Nigeria (PMAN), Pretty Okafor, in this interview with SEYI SOKOYA, speaks on how he has been able to revive his mission to transform the association during his tenure as the current president, among other issues.

Controversy trailed your election into office. How have you been able to sort out the issues?

Firstly, there is no controversy in PMAN. We are one and there is no faction in PMAN house. What we have is a bunch of people that believes that the new PMAN wants to uncover their tracks. The election was done according to the constitution and according to the judgment that brought in the interim executives. They went to file a restraining order two days after the election. The judge requested from them evidence of the filing of the restraining order: he asked them if it was said that the Minister of Labour inaugurated them. There is no constitution that gives the minister the power to inaugurate a caretaker committee. The evidence was not provided, so the case was called off.

 

Can you say that yours is the authentic PMAN executive?

Yes, we are the authentic and legal PMAN executive.

 

With the judgment, you can now carry out the plans that you have for PMAN?

We are not even depending on the judgment for that. We started working immediately we got into the system as interim officers because we were actually brought in then through the court judgment. As it is, you can say we had legal backing then and now. The truth about this PMAN administration is our sincerity of purpose. Do you want to go to PMAN to make money, or to go and change the lives of members, or better still, make an impact in the industry? For us, what we intend to do is to make impact. We have travelled around the world and we observed that our country turns out the highest number of music and movies in the world, and yet, we are the same country that doesn’t have a structure. This is negatively affecting the younger generations. We have an industry this huge but we cannot make money from it. We don’t want this kind of thing to continue. That is why we want to resolve it. The old school members such as Ruggedman, Sunny Nneji, 2Face Idibia and Baba Dee, among others, felt that if we could not get these things done, we will not be able to change the industry. This has been driving us-the desire and will-to position our entertainment industry among global players by firstly, setting up a structure.

 

How have you been carrying along the past presidents of PMAN?

We are carrying a whole lot of them along. The like of Charlie Boy, Ebenezer Obey, King Sunny Ade, among others, are really excited to know about these positive developments. We usually do a kind of campaign to educate people and some of them have been to these campaigns. Tony Okoroji and CB know about this whole structure that I told you about because we did it together. They even said that if they had this idea when they were PMAN presidents, Nigeria would not be like this. All of them embraced it and we are working together to make sure it is works perfectly. We also carry other stakeholders along.

 

Everybody keeps saying that Nigeria does not have a structure. What does that mean, and what are you doing to ensure that there is a structure?

When you talk about structure, the first thing to take into consideration is the database, which we didn’t have in times past. For a structure to be built, you will need a database through which any organisation in the world would be able to know the number of your members. From that, they will be able to know how many music and videos are being released in the country everyday. When we came in, we were able to speak with some corporate bodies, relying on the information already provided by our data generation. Now, we have purchased the highest and biggest server in Africa that can contain 33 billion data of musicians and producers.

 

Are you talking about the current PMAN?

Yes, the Nigerian PMAN that I am leading. To authenticate it, the server is being managed by the CBN and the Nigerian Inter-Bank System. It is not a PMAN affair anymore; it is the world’s affair, because everybody wants to know how the biggest entertainment market in Africa is being run.

 

Have you started gathering the data?

Yes. It is being driven technologically. Creative Nigerians are now registering with us. We have a couple of banks that we use for members’ registration. All that a prospective PMAN member has to do is to go to the bank and register with his BVN. After it has been connected, and research has been done, then an identity card would be issued the member. The ID card is a combo card which comprises your ATM and smartcard. This card gives you about five benefits. The ID card, which is a biometric card because your data is been captured from your BVN, gives you access to loan as a movie or music producer. It gives you access to medical health, life insurance and pension plan. When you are 65 years old, and want to retire from active participation, you will start getting N100, 000 as pension for the rest of your life. You will be able to bar-code and encode your intellectual properties.

 

Does this also address the issue of royalty?

It solves the problem of royalty because you will be able to bar-code your works. The Americans call it key. This key gives you access to upload your songs, movies, books, etc, on the Nigerian PMAN Industry App. The App automatically barcodes and encodes your works. Once that one has been done, your work will go viral. Barcodes are like streaming; it can be traced to know the number of people that are downloading your material. That can be used to collate it and pay you through your ATM account. For information, NIPOST and AIRTEL are involved in different capacities with PMAN. I won’t disclose the relationship until we call a press conference.

 

Talking about royalty, how does it affect MCSN and COSON? Are you not usurping their roles?

MCSN and COSON are collective societies. Both are broadcast and mechanical right collecting societies. This idea makes money for members from their creative, or what we call conception stage. Societies take over after conception. So, there is no usurping here at all!

Do you have the idea of how many members you have?

We have over 15 million musicians under PMAN around Nigeria.

 

…15 million?

Yes. 15 million registered members. When we got to office in 2015, we found out from documents that we had that much millions of members: it’s just that nobody kept the data. Then we decided to do a research with a bank and it was also concluded that the music industry, as a whole, has created about 2.6 million jobs for youths unofficially, which I later made official. People thought agriculture was the highest employer of labour in this country. That was when we found out that the information was wrong. From the report we later presented to the government, it was shown that entertainment is the highest employer of labour. Agriculture is only 8.6 million.

 

How you intend to generate the N15 trillion that you mentioned earlier?

Let me do some breakdown for people to understand. It is not that we have N15 trn in a bank. It is out there for members to access. It is like gas flaring. For many years, we were wasting it, not knowing that we were wasting money. When we decided to start marketing gas, we began to make money from what was once wasting. It is the same with the creative industry. Whenever you open YouTube, you will observe the number of downloads that each of our musicians, some ranging from 62 million to 76 million. At one dollar per download or less, multiply by the number of downloads. That is just for one artiste. What this tells us is that we will make Nigeria run very well and can make every member a millionaire. The minister even told us that he knew that there was money in the sector, but we just showed him how to gather it from our presentation.

 

Don’t you think more people will rush into the entertainment industry based on this information?

The industry is big enough to take twice, thrice the present number. It was from our report that the vice president got this information, and which informed his decision to tell the country that the entertainment industry will get us out of recession. Now, read the report of the minister of information, in which he also recently said that he had now found out that the entertainment industry was the only solution out of recession, not agriculture as many are bandying about.

 

How do you see that happening before the end of your term in office?

I don’t think it is going to take a long time for this to happen, because we are working endlessly to make sure it happens. This is not a sector where they give money to buy tractor or feeds; it is a sector where we produce millions of songs and movies everyday. We have never collected money from any organisation to build our industry; we build it ourselves.

 

N15 trillion in a year sounds unbelievable to make by any sector, let alone the entertainment industry. How will you make such an amount of money?

The huge of the number of music and movie downloads, streaming, ring back tunes and CDs calculated together for the whole of the industry is realistically 15 trillion GDP in a year. There was nobody tracking or collating it then. We are doing that now.

 

How were you able to convince CBN and others about PMAN?

We came out to sell a different perception. We tried change the perception of PMAN and how people used to see the union. I am a businessman. I own three companies and for us to be able to sell a brand that is dead is not a big issue. This organisation is not dead; it is just that we have a lot of people mismanaging it. Again, this is the only trade union in this industry. So, to achieve the rebranding of PMAN as a trade union, not an association, we chose what we had as advantage, the numerical and financial figures. 15 million members and N15 billion revenue; they listened to our presentation and they bought into the new PMAN. Music and movies are being produced everyday; we cannot stop creativity. The fact that we cannot stop creativity was why some record labels came in when the prominent ones left the country. Now, many of them want to come back knowing that PMAN now has a structure. Creativity cannot finish, but it is being wasted in Nigeria and Africa. The plan now should be that the ministry should deliberate on policies that will turn the creative industry to a creative economy. The creative economy of the UK now makes 10 million pounds per hour and 84.1 billion pounds per year. While other economies are going down, even in UK, the creative economy is going up. We went into recession last year and it did not affect the creative industry. While everybody was crying, concerts were going on and albums, videos and the rest, were being released. What is helping the structure is the digitalisation process where you will not need so many live bands; all you just need to do is to go to the studio and produce music. The structure we now have running is digitalised. That is why it needs all the support that can be mustered because statistics has shown that we are the first in Africa and number three in the world. Even CCN said in a report that if Nigeria could restructure the creative industry by 2018, the entertainment industry will generate over $10 billion. This money that we are talking about is already in existence. What we need to do is to restructure.

 

If you can revive PMAN that many had presumed dead, what about musical carnivals such as Havana and probably Star Mega Jam?

Yes. I am working with young men that are making sure they do everything that will make the industry to grow. We have been able to prove that we can have a structure and we now have a structure. If we can make all of this to happen, then there is nothing that will stop PMAN from bringing Havana back. I will want a PMAN that helps event organisers to hold concerts everyday so that members can be engaged. This is possible, but we have to start from somewhere. We want to go to the North, East, and West for events. Havana is dear to me because I remember that Junior and I, Pretty, played together twice in the 1992 and 1994 editions of Havana.

 

How was the reception for you and your late partner at University of Ibadan then?

The atmosphere then was electrifying. I’m feeling nostalgic already.  The reception was huge. Havana was bigger than Lekki Sun Splash then, and it was also the biggest university concert. The excitement of going to perform at Havana was very great, especially as we were younger then. But, we will discuss with relevant people to resurrect Havana, just as we have resurrected PMAN.