Nollywood veteran actor, Segun Arinze, was on the set of a new movie ‘Ivie’ and spoke with journalists about the scourge of abuse of intellectual property, the menace of ill-used social media and Nollywood’s role in keeping society informed. ROTIMI IGE was there and brings excerpts.
As an actor on the set of Ivie, can you tell us about your role in the film?
I don’t really want to give away details when it’s still a work in progress, I would rather we keep that element of surprise. With regards to what the movie is all about, it is based on issues of female abuse in terms of everything we see in society today like battery and child molestation. The general thing is the need for a strong focus on the girl child and the fact that we need to wean them the way our mothers used to do those days. We should make their lives feel worthwhile. It’s crazy what happens out there, the kind of things I see, read and the stories I’m told all boil down to one thing, the need for responsible parents to do our job. We can’t be too busy that we can’t focus on what is going on in our families. There is too much pressure on the teachers who themselves are also parents and need to attend to their own children. I think there must be a partnership with the school, their parents, guardians, and family members. There is something I taught my little daughter; anyone touches you inappropriately, report. And for the boys, no bullying.
As a veteran in Nollywood, the industry credited as society vanguard, what do you say to those who ascribe a lot of vices that are in the society to the industry?
Nollywood is the watchdog of society, but a lot of things happened before the advent of Nollywood. Of course, we’ve always had an industry, but when you try to put the blame on the doorstep of Nollywood, I think you are shying away from your responsibility. There is nothing that you are seeing now that hasn’t happened before, so what Nollywood does is just to bring out the stories and facts and recreate those facts to let you know that these things are not right. If you see a movie and at the end of the movie, evil triumphs over good, then the movie has failed. And it’s not just Nollywood, it is film industries all over the world. It’s the things they do for family orientation, social change, education and information so you just cannot blindly say Nollywood, that’s as if you’re trying to lay blame while trying to run from your responsibility. We will continue to be the mouthpiece of society, we’ll continue to see things that are wrong and tell you that it is wrong because that is what the industry is about. So wherever you are hearing that from, I’ll ask you to just disregard. What I like to see in Nollywood now is that we are getting more professional, we are shooting better films. They say we do rituals in films, but rituals are part of life. The popular British film, Harry Potter is about ritual and magic. It is witchcraft, but you will rather take money and go and watch Harry Potter. But when you see one film being shot in Asaba and Lagos and the man is wearing red, they start saying ‘Nollywood has started ritual again’, and then you start blaming the industry and condemning your own. It’s crazy, it’s sickening. We tell the story as it is. That is our job, we are storytellers. When a man gathers children under the tree and tells them a story about someone who did something bad, at the end, when he asks them what the moral of the story is, you won’t expect them to say what the storyteller did was bad. He is simply telling them a story. Sometimes we make movies, we sit down have people come and see the movie before it even goes out to the public and they censor it. We are telling the Nigerian story. We are telling the African story. We have evolved over the years and we will continue to evolve with better films; young actors are also coming in. And I encourage all the young ones out there to keep on working, and never stop. Just keep on working and never stop asking the questions.
The world recently celebrated Intellectual Property Day, and Nollywood is one of the industries where these issues affect practitioners. Are things better now, when you look back?
I think people just pay lip service about this intellectual property thing because people still steal your work. I don’t think it’s right because after marking the day, everyone just goes back to relax. The issue of intellectual property should be an ongoing thing, it is a continual thing and shouldn’t have an end. You find people stealing people’s stories, changing the stories; sometimes you do a movie, people put it in cassettes or flash drives, carry it out of the country and go make money. Yet you are high and dry, which doesn’t make any sense. I think there should be more in terms of enforcing the laws that exist to protect intellectual property. And this is where I will call up the National Assembly. They should come together and see how they can push these laws forward. Right now, when you commit an intellectual property rights offence and you are taken to court, it’s just a slap on the wrist, it’s like you stole meat from the pot. Stealing is stealing no matter how you look at it, there is no small or big thief, likewise, a crime is a crime, a thief is a thief. I just believe we are paying lip service, and until we are ready as an industry to talk about it and do something, piracy, intellectual property theft will continue to evolve. If we just push and don’t do anything about it, Abuja will just be looking at you. But if you push and make all the noise, they will react to it and do something about it. Even the police force needs to have a department for intellectual property. The police force is very large so you can create a department for copyright, not just in the entertainment industry, but for others. You can be an architect and someone steals your designs, which is an infringement on your copyright as well. We need to pay serious attention to it.
What do you think is the first step to achieving that? Creating better laws, updating the laws?
You just answered the question. It is to update the laws and strengthen them as well, make punishment more severe; I’m not saying capital punishment, but make it very severe. Confiscate all the materials, go to the person’s account, lock the account, take all the money in the account and give it back to those whose intellectual properties were stolen. Let’s take Chinua Achebe’s books, ‘Things Fall Apart’, ‘No Longer At Ease’, and ‘There Was A Country’; I saw them on the street being hawked and of course, they were pirated. In the first three weeks of Genevieve’s ‘Lion Heart’ when it came out, I personally came out of the car and was chasing the guy holding the DVD he was selling on the street.
What do you say to those content creators or artistes who take their works to these criminals to pirate them so that they get popular?
They are stupid.
Has social media made Nollywood better?
Has social media even made the country better? That’s the question you should be asking yourself, not just Nollywood. Has social media helped anybody? What you find on social media is sometimes very disgusting. People take advantage of the fact that social media is an open platform so you can go there and throw junk. Social media is a junkyard, so you sieve through it, pick what you think applies to you and use it. If you’re lucky, you get better with it. If you’re not lucky, you sink with it. Children these days have phones and parents hardly censor their kids; they go on Youtube and Instagram. These days, everyone wants to do TikTok, it’s crazy. People just do all sorts, so it is a garbage yard. When you go there, you begin to sieve out what you think is the right content for you to consume. Social media also has its own positive. It helped us recently. I think celebrities should use social media to help change. Talk to the young ones. Talk to the boy child, talk to the girl child. Once a child is born to a family, that child integrates. Just be careful how you handle social media. You must be extremely careful how you throw that dice, if you throw the dice the wrong way you sink with it.
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