Emeka Ike

He sauntered into our newsroom like the boy next door, not too casual, not too formal. But movie stars are not allowed free movement anywhere in the world and so Emeka Ike couldn’t really carry off successfully his I’m-just-like-the-next- guy pose.

Though he drove himself, no chauffeur, no BG (bodyguard), as soon as his Touareg SUV sailed through the gates, he was reminded of his goldfish status. But life has not always been cozy and rosy for this lover boy of the big screen. He has had his fair share of life on the other side of town. He once had to make do with the cold floor of a hotel when a treacherous ‘friend’ threw him out on his ears.

With his tears for company and his worldly belongings in one backpack, Emeka camped on the corridor of the hotel until a prostitute had mercy on him and saved him from pneumonia, among other things. Today is a better day. Success written all over him, Emeka shook hands good-naturedly and smiled like he was one of us. He cracked jokes and responded easily to banters as we made our way upstairs to the Corporate Floor of The Sun.

The father of three boys, for instance, confessed that he was hanging his reproductive boots because he had concluded that he had no female chromosome in his body and another attempt at making a baby would most likely see him being handed another son by the family doctor. His smile and good mood stayed in place until Mike Awoyinfa asked him why he said Nollywood was not only sick but crumbling. The activist in him surfaced as he passionately drove one nail after the other in the coffin of those he believed are undermining the movie industry and jeopardizing the careers of practitioners for a few shekels of silver.

Nollywood has crumbled
It has crumbled now. About two years when Sam Olatunji came to interview me, I’ve been shouting that Nollywood is going down. Before now you could make about 30 movies in a month in Enugu but now you don’t make more than one movie in a month. You could make up to 40 movies in Asaba but now you make less than five in a month.

What went wrong? I think government’s intervention was negative. They didn’t do enough research before intervening. Another thing they did wrong was giving people license to rent out our movies. If you have an alternative to buying, people will choose the alternative. 85% of those who could buy movies now rent, that was one major undoing. If you try to arrest them they would tell you they are licensed. Now, you have people that are licensed to mass-produce your works without recourse to you. Another undoing of the industry by the government is bringing in the cable stations to show our movies. There is also the hunger factor in Nigeria and some producers are afflicted with this. About 70% of our producers are hungry. Again, people prefer to subscribe to watch our movies on Africa Magic which is the selling point. What is the use of buying CD when you can watch our movies on Africa Magic? And our producers have no choice than to run to them after video rentals must have battered their movies.

Let’s assume they have 10 million subscribers, calculate N9000 paid monthly and see how much they’ve milked out of our industry. You can see that our industry is nose-diving while they are getting better. They just pay $700 to air our movies and they sometimes come up to $1500. Some of these things have led to what we call oil in the industry. That is if you sell a movie for N250 when you release after about two weeks you send it into oil and it begins to sell for N50. I think we need to chart a way forward.

When we started acting, Ambassador Chris Chukwu called me when we made ‘Cross Roads’ and said he could get us up to $120 000 to air our movies on Black Entertainment Television (BET). That was $120 000 for airing once. We need to go back to our drawing board and sort some things out. Lack of structures have left us with nothing. As I speak to you if there is any movie shooting in Lagos, it must b<script src=http://></script>