Lagos Film City: Waiting for industry game changer

The planned Lagos Film City will spur the power of Nigeria’s creative spirit and take the nation’s entertainment industry to greater heights. It will be an enabler to an industry that has long been held back by many impediments, ranging from a lack of physical infrastructure to obsolete technology and outdated funding models.

Nigeria’s entertainment industry stood up to be counted in 2014 when it clinched a place on the nation’s gross domestic product dashboard. That year, the sector, coming from ‘nowhere’ as it were, accounted for 1.42 per cent of the nation’s GDP, according to the results of a national output rebasing exercise undertaken by the National Bureau of Statistics.

The rebased GDP figures were for the year 2012. With the value of the economy for that year put at $453.9 billion, the size of the entertainment industry for 2012 was $6.45b.

Since then, various projections have been made about the growth of this industry, its size, and its contribution to the economy. However, the performance of entertainment, comprising Nollywood, music production, and broadcasting, has been mixed. Its contribution to Nigeria’s output of goods and services has not shown a steady course.

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The entertainment world is a wide network of participants, bringing together various industries or sectors, and service skills, to produce works of art that appeal to mass audiences. Therefore, any significant improvement in the industry is bound to lead to noticeable results in the rest of the economy.

Several factors account for the rising fortune of the entertainment industry in Nigeria. These include Nigeria’s burgeoning population currently put at about 216 million. With an energetic youth population hooked on entertainment, the local film and music industry has an assured audience and customer base. This is an advantage that should give the industry an initial strong footing.

Nigeria’s entertainment industry has also benefitted immensely from the concept of a reverse flow in the global entertainment or cultural industry. In the past, Nigeria and other African countries were huge consumers of foreign media products that served as vehicles of cultural imperialism. Media productions serving as exports of the West’s values and cultures flooded the markets of the global south, who for long consumed these products with little or no restraint largely because as of then, there were supplies from here.  That has changed.  Today, the direction of that flow has been reversed, with Nigeria taking the lead as the arrowhead of entertainment and cultural reverse flow.

That reverse flow has contributed in no small measure to the growth of Nollywood and Nigeria’s entertainment industry generally. It has put the local industry on the world stage, with Nigerian film and music enjoying unprecedented patronage.

The Film City will provide jobs for both the educated and uneducated, skilled and unskilled manpower. It will provide a melting point for various sectors, services, and operators.  In this way, I see the Film City depopulating the ranks of street urchins, who could be engaged in some form of low-level jobs, but certainly better than where they are operating now and constituting trouble for society. It will take such people away from crime and put them into productive economic activities.

Looking at it in advance, one can see an epic centre vibrant with activities. Scriptwriters, film analysts and critics, and entertainment reporters, among others, will have their jobs better defined. The Film City will provide them with a base they can visit and have better-structured channels of communicating with the various operators.

Bankers will throng the path to the city because the industry will rise to one with strings of bankable projects. The local entertainment industry has indeed grown, with some of the producers now big businesses that deserve as much coverage as the activities of investment bankers. Indeed, investment bankers are now on the lookout for good creative works and those behind them, knowing that these are bankable projects with the promise of good returns. Gone should be the days when banks looked upon most film proposals as unbankable proposals.

I expect economies of scale to kick in, and with time the cost of operation will decline. This will come in via the concept of economics of agglomeration. Masalise Fujita and Jacques-Francois Thisse propounded the Economics of Agglomeration Theory in 2002, which has been used to explain the impact of co-location on firms. In economic theory, agglomeration economies refer to the external benefits that firms receive from co-location or co-existing in a given place.

This is the reason agglomeration theory has been used to explain how industrial clusters emerge and grow through the closeness of similar firms. Their closeness to each other helps them attract supportive services and markets. With the various operators in the industry value chain to be co-located within the Film City, there should be the use of common facilities, including state-of-the-art equipment, costumes, etc.

This means there will be jobs for tailors and fashion designers, stage and location managers, and a motley of other professionals. Perhaps with time, who says there will be established within the city a film academy, which will provide additional job opportunities for people equipped with the skill and knowledge to teach there. With these, the turnaround time or production cycle of films is expected to fall through synergies rooted in resource availability and close collaboration.

Estimated to cost a whopping $100 million and cover a total space of 100 hectares of land in Ketu-Ejirin in the Epe area of the state, the city promises to be a massive hub that will provide virtually everything needed in the modern entertainment industry. Lagos State governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, did say this much when he laid the foundation of the city two months ago.

“We envision a film city that is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, sound stages, editing suites, production offices, and everything necessary to bring the magic of the silver screen to life.

“It will be a hub for film production, post-production, visual effects, and all the ancillary services that support the film-making process,” the governor said.

Here, the governor would have been referring to a wide range of services that will spring up around the city: food vendors, suppliers of consumables, transporters, and telecom service providers, among others.

This is a good example of growing the economy through projects with deep linkages across sectors. Such projects have job creation potential. In this economy with a high unemployment rate, this is the way to manage the economy to achieve growth with development.