‘How we grew attendance at this year’s NIFESTEENA’

BM Dzukogi is the founder of the Nigerian Festival of Teen Artists in Minna, Niger State. Now in its second year, Dzukogi speaks to Adewale Oshodi on how the organisation is helping to develop future writers. Excerpts:

IT’S two years since you founded the Nigerian Festival of Teen Artists (NIFESTEENA) in Minna, Niger State. How did you come about the idea for the festival?

Well, our foundation has been in the vanguard of promoting National Teen Authorship Scheme since 1997. As you know, we have been running the Annual Schools Carnivals of Art and Festival of Songs (ASCAFS) for secondary schools in Niger State since 1995. This programme has produced many authors in Nigeria. We have published teen authors from other states through the Association of Nigerian Authors at national and state levels. Our foundation has coordinators in about 27 states in Nigeria. Therefore, we thought we should create a national platform where teen artists from around the country can meet to compete, showcase their books and other artistic skills towards professionalism and good citizenship. Indeed, we have as objective the inculcation of reading habit as one primary focus. We want the student artists to speak to themselves through art, what they think of society, how they want it to be and work towards creating one during their lifetime. The reasons for NIFESTEENA are many, including developing critical citizenry, student authors serving as role models in classrooms, as well as appropriation of student’s habits towards good through the good their peers have written.

 

Participants from about nine states witnessed the first edition, while participants from 27 states took part in the second edition, which was hosted in Kaduna last April. How did you grow the attendance within just a year?

Some states like Bayelsa, Katsina, Niger, Kebbi, Abuja, Kaduna, Osun, Nasarawa, Bauchi, Sokoto, Oyo, Anambra, Ekiti and Rivers came with more than three schools each. We had more than 700 active participants/contestants this year. There are five categories of artistic expressions or contests in NIFESTEENA. We have creative writing where contestants have to be published teens, whether as single authors or authors in an anthology. There is spoken word and poetry performance, there is painting and photography. We have contemporary song as a category too. We also have folksong as a category. This year, we had our folksong in Yoruba, and this drew many participants from the South West part of the country. We also had cultural display as a category too. The performance team showcased the Tiv culture. We also had mentoring sessions, nights of performances and workshops. About 39 trophies were won. NIFESTEENA is a new national event in the arts.

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In what ways do you think the festival is promoting arts, and particularly literature, in the country?

It is serving that purpose already. The trick is that students who are growing with the spirit and skills of arts in mind are likely to become excellent ones at adulthood. The books they are writing and we are publishing for them becomes life-long documents that keep them on track. One of the primary features of this year’s NIFESTEENA was the public presentation of the Nigerian Anthology of Teen Authors by the initiator of Yasmin El-Rufai Literary Foundation, Hajiya Hadiza Isma El-Rufai. In 2016, our foundation published 11 teen authors as single authors each. That’s 11 titles or 11 new teen authors with a book of their own each. Imagine if each state in Nigeria is producing 11 teen authors annually. You have about 400 new young writers into the Nigerian society.

 

Considering the economic situation in the country, how do you get funding for NIFESTEENA?

The first edition was almost solely sponsored by the Niger State government through the Chief of Staff, while the Kaduna State government sponsored the second edition.

It must also be stated that the wife of the governor, Hajiya el-Rufai also runs a literary art foundation, and the first of its kind in Northern Nigeria by a First Lady to any state governor. That her foundation is for book development makes her exceptional among first ladies in Nigeria. She’s also a writer.