Itunu Adeteye Says, Baba Segi’s Wives Isn’t Made to Make Money, But Rather to Make Nigerians Happy

Meet the Woman Selling a Film She Says Isn’t For Sale

Itunu Adeteye is, by her own account, the head of PR and marketing for The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, the person whose entire job exists to convince Nigerians to buy tickets, generate buzz, and protect the commercial standing of a major EbonyLife release. So it should stop everyone in their tracks that this same woman, in the middle of defending the film against my December predictions piece, said the makers “aren’t looking for money,” that it’s really about “making Nigerians happy.” That’s not a throwaway comment from a random fan account. That’s the PR and marketing lead of a four-studio co-production, with a TIFF Centrepiece premiere and a BFI London Festival slot behind it, telling the public that the machine she runs isn’t actually trying to make money. If that’s true, she’s confessing to doing her job badly. If it isn’t true, she’s lying to protect a film from legitimate scrutiny. Either way, it’s a bad look, and it deserves to be picked apart.

If It’s Not About Money, Where’s the Free Ticket?

Here’s the test Itunu set for herself without realizing it, if this film genuinely isn’t about money, then EbonyLife and its partners should release it free of charge across every cinema in Nigeria and let “Nigerian happiness” be its own reward. They won’t do that, because they can’t, because that was never the plan and everyone involved in financing this project knows it. Films of this scale cost money to make, market, and distribute, and recouping that isn’t a betrayal of art, it’s the entire reason a box office exists. When the person paid to manage that commercial reality can’t say so plainly, and instead reaches for a warm, meaningless line about spreading joy, she isn’t protecting the film’s integrity. She’s insulting the intelligence of the very audience she’s trying to sell to, as if Nigerians can’t tell the difference between a heartfelt mission statement and a dodge.

A PR Lead Who Doesn’t Understand PR

The one rule that never changes in this job is simple, don’t hand your critics a contradiction they didn’t have to go looking for. Itunu did exactly that. By insisting the film has no commercial ambition, she made every other piece of the film’s own promotional machinery, the trailers, the festival coverage, the international dubbing plans, the December theatrical push, look dishonest by her own standard. That’s not clever spin, that’s self-sabotage dressed up as sincerity. A PR lead who actually understood the assignment would defend the film’s commercial ambitions with confidence, because there is nothing wrong with a film wanting to make money. Instead, Itunu reached for the softest, most unfalsifiable line she could find, and it fell apart the moment a single follow-up question was asked of it, which is exactly what happened.

Twelve Comments, Five Videos, and Still No Real Argument

What makes all of this harder to take seriously is the sheer disproportion of how she chose to respond. Twelve comments under one prediction post. Five separate videos made in reply. A trip into my DMs to keep “educating” me, uninvited, after all of that. That is not the behavior of someone who is confident in her position, it is the behavior of someone trying to out-volume a point she could not out-argue. If the film truly isn’t about money, and my piece was as baseless as she seemed to think, none of that effort should have been necessary. Instead, she spent more energy defending a talking point than most people spend defending their own name, and that alone tells you the talking point was never as solid as she wanted it to look.

She Says It’s Not a Competition. So Why Does She Sound So Defensive?

To be clear, I called this a competition between Funke Akindele, Toyin Abraham, and the EbonyLife camp (MA), not Itunu. That framing is mine, as a critic, and I stand by it, three major Nigerian productions chasing the same December window for the same audience’s money is a competition, whether or not anyone involved wants to say the word out loud. What’s telling is that Itunu didn’t just disagree with that framing, she treated it as an accusation to be stamped out, something requiring twelve comments and five videos to correct. If there truly were nothing competitive about three big-budget December releases jostling for the same box office weekend, a simple, calm clarification would have done the job. The scale of her reaction suggests she knows exactly how competitive this landscape is, and that the real objection was never to the word “competition”, it was to having that competition named out loud where audiences could see it.

Using Mo Abudu as the Figurehead Wasn’t Wrong, It Was Accurate

None of this should be confused with the other argument Itunu tried to pick, that I was wrong to place Mo Abudu’s photo alongside Funke Akindele and Toyin Abraham as the face of the “big 3” this December. I wasn’t. Every major trade outlet covering this film, from Variety to Deadline to BellaNaija, has anchored its coverage on Abudu personally, “Mo Abudu returns to the big screen,” “Mo Abudu’s EbonyLife brings this novel to cinemas.” She is the one doing the press rounds at TIFF and BFI London, the one framing the film’s themes in interviews, the one whose name and company built the entire commercial identity of this release, even though she is not its only credited producer. Industry convention has always treated the person a studio is built around, and who fronts its media strategy, as that project’s public face, and EbonyLife’s own promotional strategy has already made that choice for me. Itunu’s objection wasn’t a correction of fact, it was a defense of optics, and optics don’t get to overrule how the film’s own team has already chosen to present it to the world.