Vice-Chancellor of University of Abuja (UniAbuja), Prof Rasheed Na’Allah, has said the government needs to support the film industry because it is a multi-million-dollar sector that can turn around the fortune of Nigeria.
Speaking at a conference on ‘Decolonization African Cinema in the age of Media Streaming’ in honour of one of the pioneer writers in Nollywood, Prof Onookome Okome, in Abuja on Wednesday, the VC said Nollywood can create wealth as people all over the world are following it.
“Is it our movies, music, cultural dances or our languages? They are all taking the world by surprise because it is going to Japan, China or America and it is creating foreign reserves for Nigeria and huge money,” he said.
The Vice Chancellor said Netflix is already showing Nigerian movies and “if you fly anywhere, you will watch them and that is a lot of money coming to Nigeria.”
The VC also advised against abandoning of local languages which is our cultural identity to embrace only speaking English.
He said so many people have diminished what it means to be a Nigerian because they have abandoned their local languages which is their cultural identity as Africans.
He said Omone was being honoured for being one of the few people who started writing in Nollywood from the very beginning and has built the legacy of selling it to the world.
In his remark, Okome said his interest is in popular culture and the way that it influences the way they live in Nigeria.
“The reason I started this was simply because we want to begin to discuss some of our own at home, so that we take control of it, the original thin. since Independence is that the Europeans create the knowledge for us and then they bring it to us. But for the very first time in the history of scholarship in this country, we created the knowledge and we gave it back to them,” he said.
He agreed that the West misrepresents Nigeria in not just movies but a lot of things and saying, “In fact, I’ve been accused of trying to valorize Nollywood but that’s not the truth. I mean, I write from the inside and the reason is to teach people who don’t know the culture about our culture.”
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