It's Just Business: The Lie Nollywood Tells While Eating Its Own

Everybody in This Industry Has a Scar, And Everybody Knows Who Gave It to Them

Sit with anybody who has spent more than three years in Nollywood; actor, writer, DOP, marketer, PA, anybody, and give them one drink and thirty minutes. The story will come out. The producer who used their concept after a "let's just discuss it first" meeting. The director who replaced them mid-project and let them find out from an Instagram flyer. The colleague who took the pitch deck into another room and came out with a deal that didn't include them. The crew that wrapped a six-week shoot and is still, two years later, sending "good afternoon sir, please regarding the balance" messages into a WhatsApp void. The mentor who introduced them everywhere as "my daughter, my son" until the moment a bigger name became available for the role they were promised. These are not rare stories. These are not unfortunate exceptions. This is the standard onboarding experience of the Nigerian film industry, the scar is practically your membership card. And here is the part that should disturb you more than the wickedness itself: everybody knows. The industry is small. Lagos is smaller. We all know who doesn't pay, who steals formats, who drops people like PoS receipts. We know, we whisper it at premieres, we warn our close friends in voice notes, and then we watch the same people get honoured on stage, get brand deals, get government appointments, get standing ovations at the same events where their victims are serving as ushers. The problem I want to talk about is not that Nollywood has wicked people. Every industry on Earth has wicked people. The problem is that Nollywood is the only industry I know where wickedness has a 100% success rate and a 0% consequence rate, and we have all agreed to call that arrangement "business."

‘It's Just Business' Is the Biggest Scam Phrase in This Industry, Because We Don't Actually Do Business

Let's interrogate the phrase itself, because it's doing a lot of criminal work. When someone in Lagos steps on you and says "no hard feelings, it's just business," they are borrowing the costume of a system they have refused to join. Because actual business, the thing they're claiming to do, is not the absence of feelings. It is the presence of rules. Real business is contracts that mean something, terms that get enforced, credits that can't be quietly erased, payments tied to deliverables with penalties for default, disputes that end in arbitration instead of Instagram Live. Hollywood is ten times more ruthless than Nollywood, nobody should be confused about that, but when Hollywood ruthlessness crosses a line, a guild files a grievance, an agency makes calls, a lawyer sends a letter that ruins someone's quarter, and a residuals cheque still arrives at the house of an actor whose scene was cut. Ruthlessness over there operates inside a cage. What we run here is not business; it is jungle economics wearing a blazer. Our contracts, when they exist at all, are decorative documents nobody intends to enforce, signed in the knowledge that dragging anyone to court will cost more than the fee being stolen and outlast everyone's career. "It's just business" in Nollywood translates directly to: "there is no referee, I checked." And the phrase is so effective because it flips the shame, suddenly the person who was robbed is the unprofessional one for being emotional about it, and the person who did the robbing is the shrewd operator. We have built an entire industry vocabulary designed to make victims feel naive for expecting decency. That is not toughness. That is not hustle. That is a failed state with a film industry inside it.

The Reason the Wickedness Thrives Is Simple: Stepping on People in Nollywood Costs Absolutely Nothing

Follow the incentive, and everything explains itself. In any functioning industry, betrayal has a price tag, legal, financial, or reputational, and people do cost-benefit analysis before they burn you. Now run that analysis in Nollywood. Legal cost of not paying your crew? Effectively zero: no worker is taking a producer to court over a fee that's less than the lawyer's consultation, and everybody knows it. Institutional cost? Zero: the guilds that should have teeth function mostly as event planners and condolence committees, quick to suspend shoots for optics after a tragedy, absent when a member needs a contract enforced or a defaulter sanctioned. Reputational cost? This is the one that should work, and it's the one we've most thoroughly destroyed, because in our industry, memory is negotiable. The same producer everyone was dragging in 2022 is premiering to a full house in 2026, because access forgives everything here: the moment someone controls a budget, a slot, or a co-sign, their history evaporates and the same people who were victims are in the comments typing "congratulations boss." So do the math the way a predator does: if stealing a concept costs nothing, if ghosting on payment costs nothing, if replacing someone without a phone call costs nothing, then in a low-margin, high-desperation industry, wickedness isn't a character flaw. It's the rational strategy. That's the sentence I need you to sit with. We have engineered an environment where the most efficient career path is stepping on people, and then we gather at panels wondering aloud why the industry "lacks unity." The industry doesn't lack unity. The industry lacks consequences, and people behave exactly as well as their environment forces them to.

And Please, Let's Retire the "Struggle Made Us This Way" Excuse, Poverty Didn't Sign Those Contracts

I already know the defence that's loading, so let me address it before it lands in my comments. "Dami, you don't understand, this industry was built with no support, no funding, no structure; people had to survive." Fine. True, even. Nollywood was genuinely built from nothing, by people the banks wouldn't see, and the government wouldn't fund, and survival instincts from that era are real. But let's be very honest about who is doing the worst stepping in 2026, because it is not the hungry. The most brutal treachery in this industry is happening at the top, between people who have eaten. It's established names cutting collaborators out of projects they originated. It's producers with three brand endorsements owing junior crew members N200k for over a year while posting Santorini. It's gatekeepers who survived the wicked era faithfully reproducing it downward, treating the people under them exactly how they swore they'd never be treated, because now it's their turn to chop. Scarcity might explain the behaviour of a hungry marketer in 1997; it does not explain a millionaire executive producer in 2026 ghosting a writer over a fee that is less than their weekend brunch budget. At some point, "struggle" stopped being a wound this industry carries and became a costume it wears, a permanent moral alibi that lets the powerful behave like the desperate while enjoying none of the desperation. The struggle built Nollywood's resilience, yes. But it also built its cruelty, and we have spent thirty years celebrating the resilience while refusing to even name the cruelty. You cannot heal what you keep calling a personality trait.

Here Is What the Wickedness Is Actually Costing Us, And It's Bigger Than Anyone's Feelings

If this were only about hurt feelings, maybe you could argue it's the price of showbiz. But the trust deficit is quietly strangling this industry's growth, and I can trace it for you. Why does every Nollywood heavyweight run their own production company, their own crew, their own everything, instead of merging into the studio-sized entities this industry desperately needs to compete globally? Trust. Nobody will build a ten-year structure with people they've watched eat their partners. Why do our brightest talents take the first foreign option, the diaspora production, the UK training route, the streaming deal signed directly with people abroad, and rarely look back? Partly money, yes, but ask them privately: it's the relief of working somewhere a contract is a contract. Why won't serious local capital, the banks, the pension funds, the family offices that fund everything else in this economy, touch film? Because investors don't fund industries where agreements are suggestions and revenue can vanish between the cinema and the report. Every act of unpunished treachery in this industry sends the same message to money and talent alike: nothing here is safe. And the cruellest irony? The individual "sharp guys" winning these little battles are collectively guaranteeing that the industry stays too small for their victories to mean anything. You stepped on your collaborator to own 100% of a project, congratulations, you now own 100% of a ceiling. Meanwhile, the industries we envy, the ones whose budgets and reach we post about with crying emojis, are built on the one asset Nollywood has never valued: the ability of strangers to work together without eating each other. Trust is not a soft virtue. Trust is infrastructure. And we are the only film industry of our size actively demolishing ours for content.

The Fix Is Not Prayer, Panels, or "Unity", It's Making Wickedness Expensive Again

So what do we do, hold hands at AFRIFF and promise to be nicer? Please. Behaviour doesn't change through appeals; it changes through pricing. If Nollywood wants the stepping to stop, the industry has to do one thing: make it cost something. That means guilds that function like guilds, a real arbitration system where payment disputes and credit theft get resolved in weeks, not decade-long court fantasies, and where proven defaulters face actual sanctions: suspension from member productions, exclusion from guild-endorsed projects, names on a register that financiers and brands can check. It means standardised minimum contracts across the industry, crew, cast, writers, so that "we didn't sign anything formal" stops being the loophole every predator drives through. It means productions publishing payment compliance the way they publish box office, because if we can flex numbers we can flex receipts. It means brands, cinemas, festivals and streamers, the people whose money everyone respects, asking one simple question before partnering with anyone: "any unresolved disputes?" The day that question costs somebody a deal is the day this industry starts healing. And on the individual level, it means breaking the amnesia: stop giving standing ovations to people whose victims you know by name. Memory is the cheapest enforcement mechanism an industry has, and ours is for sale every awards season. I'm not asking Nollywood to become soft, ambition, competition, even ruthlessness within rules, all of that can stay. I'm asking us to finally admit that what we've been calling "business" is just cruelty with good PR, and that an industry where the safest strategy is trusting nobody will never build anything that outlives its founders. We are eating our own and calling it a food chain. It's not. It's a leak. And every year we refuse to plug it, the future drains out, one unpaid crew member, one stolen concept, one broken partnership at a time.