Stop Funding Nollywood's Landlords: The Film Funds are Going to the Wrong People

The Money Keeps Meeting Itself at the Same Address

Every few years, Nigeria announces a new pot of film money and the industry claps like it's the first time. Bank of Industry's NollyFund arrived with fanfare and press conferences. Project ACT Nollywood under Goodluck Jonathan came with billions attached and photographs of ministers smiling next to actors. Lagos State has run creative sector interventions. Netflix landed with a Naija war chest and everybody's agent suddenly remembered their number. Add the creative economy summits, the AFEX-style financing schemes, the CBN creative industry loans, on paper, Nollywood has been "funded" more times in fifteen years than most African film industries have been funded in their entire history. And yet, if you trace where the cheques actually land, you find the same fifteen to twenty names appearing again and again, the same producers, the same directors, the same "bankable" hands who were already bankable before the fund existed. The money moves, but it never travels. It leaves one Lekki meeting room and arrives in another Lekki meeting room, sometimes in the same building. We have built a funding system that works like an owambe where the aso-ebi list never changes: same faces, same seats, same jollof, same souvenirs. And then, with a straight face, we act surprised when the films all look the same, sound the same, and open in cinemas the same way, because we keep watering the same tree and wondering why the forest isn't growing.

Funding Safe Hands Is a Category Error, Not a Strategy

Here is the part nobody in those rooms wants to say out loud: giving film funds to established players is not "de-risking" the investment, it is defeating the entire purpose of the fund's existence. Think about what the big names actually have access to. They can walk into a bank and get a loan against their track record. They can get distributor advances because exhibitors know their films open. They can get brand partnerships because telcos and betting companies want their faces. They can pre-sell to streamers because the platforms already have their numbers. The market, flawed as it is, already serves these people. So when a fund, whether it's public money, development finance, or a streamer's investment arm, hands its cheque to the same hands, what has it actually achieved? It has financed a film that would have been financed anyway. That is not an investment in cinema; it is a subsidy for the status quo, a government-stamped duplicate of money that already existed in the system. Film funds exist for exactly one reason, and it's written into every mission statement they publish: to absorb the risk that the market refuses to take. That is the whole job description. It is why they exist in Korea, in France, in Canada, everywhere serious about cinema as culture and not just commerce. When you hand that risk-absorbing money to the safest hands in the room, you have not made a smart bet, you have made a category error, laundered it through a selection committee, and printed a press release about it. It's like setting up a scholarship fund for brilliant indigent students and awarding it every year to children whose parents own the school.

The Big Names Aren't Lazy, They're Trapped, and That's Exactly the Problem

Let me be fair to the establishment for a moment, because this argument is not about hating anybody's hustle, and the veterans deserve a more honest diagnosis than "they've lost it." The truth is more uncomfortable: the big names are not creatively bankrupt out of laziness; they are creatively conservative out of arithmetic. Walk through the maths with me. When you have an office in Ikeja or Lekki, fifteen to thirty salaries dropping every month, generators to fuel, school fees to pay, and a reputation where one visible flop can cost you your next three brand deals, you cannot afford to experiment, literally, financially, cannot. You will make the wedding comedy because wedding comedies open. You will greenlight the remake because the title already has awareness and awareness is half the marketing budget. You will cast the skit maker with two million followers even though he cannot act, because the marketing plan needs his Instagram more than the script needs his talent. You will shoot in the same three estates, hire the same DPs, and land on the same December release corridor, because December is when Nigerians go to the cinema and you have salaries to pay in January. Every one of those decisions is rational. Every one of them is defensible in a boardroom. And that is precisely the problem: funding these filmmakers guarantees conservative output, not because they are bad people, but because they are structurally incapable of taking the risks the fund was designed to enable. They have too much to protect. Survival filmmaking is real, it is valid, and it keeps thousands of crew members employed, but it should be financed by the commercial market it serves, not by money whose entire justification is pushing the industry somewhere it hasn't been.

The Outsiders Already Proved the Case, On Scraps

Now look at who actually moved Nigerian cinema forward this decade, and pay attention to their entry points, because the pattern is loud. C.J. Obasi and the Surreal 16 collective spent years being told their work was "too art house," "too dark," "not what Nigerians want", the standard gatekeeper liturgy, and then Mami Wata went to Sundance, picked up a jury prize, and became one of the most internationally discussed Nigerian films ever made. A black-and-white film. In an industry where distributors will tell you to your face that Nigerians don't watch black and white. Shot in defiance of every commercial commandment the establishment swears by, and it did more for Nigeria's cinematic reputation abroad than a decade of December blockbusters. Editi Effiong walked in from the tech world, applied product thinking, audience data, and startup discipline to The Black Book, and put a Nigerian film in Netflix's global charts, then went further and published the budget breakdown publicly, committing the ultimate Nollywood taboo of transparency. (Even though I  thought the film was overrated). There are more. However, none of these people came through the anointed pipeline. Nobody handed them the fund cheque at the summit. They came through the side door, carrying unusual ideas and unusual skills, and they delivered the exact things every fund's mission statement claims to want: prestige, international headlines, new audiences, new models. Now do the thought experiment the funders refuse to do: these results happened on scraps, on personal savings, on favours and deferred payments. Imagine the ceiling if the side-door people got the actual money instead of the vibes.

Fund the Marketing, Not Just the Shoot, Or Watch the Films Die Quietly

Here is where every Nigerian film fund quietly fails, and where the fix lives, because it's not enough to say fund different people; you have to fund them differently. Funded films in Nigeria don't die on set. They die at release, silently, because 100% of the grant went into production and the film arrives in the market naked: no P&A budget, no campaign, no positioning, just a prayer and a poster designed in three days.

So, first fix: ring-fence a minimum of 30% of every grant for distribution and marketing, non-negotiable, written into the grant agreement, released in tranches tied to an actual campaign plan. A film nobody hears about is a film that doesn't exist, and right now we are funding films into nonexistence.

Second: stop releasing funded films as orphans. Release them as a branded slate, call it a season, "New Nigerian Cinema," whatever the branding people land on, the way A24 turned a logo into a genre and a genre into an audience that shows up on trust alone. Ten unknown filmmakers marketed together borrow one collective reputation instead of each fighting the algorithm alone with a N200,000 promo budget.

Third: route unusual films through unusual windows. A funded experimental film should not be queuing behind Behind The Scenes, for cinema screens it mathematically cannot win. Take it to university circuits, where the exact audience for strange and new lives in concentrated form. Do community and rooftop screenings that turn a film into an event. Do YouTube premieres with sponsor money attached. Build WhatsApp-native trailers, vertical, subtitled, under sixty seconds, designed to be forwarded rather than posted, because WhatsApp is Nigeria's real distribution network and nobody is programming for it deliberately.

Fourth: for the prestige titles, go festival-first as strategy, not accident. International laurels convert directly into local curiosity, Nigerians famously start valuing our own things the moment Toronto, Sundance or Cannes does, and Mami Wata is the proof of concept sitting in plain sight. The gatekeepers will call all of this unserious. The receipts say otherwise.

The Ask Is Simple: Move the Money to Where the Risk Lives

So this is the position, stated plainly enough that no committee can pretend to misunderstand it: the next film fund, federal, state, streamer, development bank, whoever, should be explicitly barred from functioning as a loyalty bonus for the already-arrived. Score applications on novelty of voice, unusualness of entry point, and measurable distance from the current genre wheel, and publish the scoring rubric so we can all see it. Cap how many times the same production companies can drink from the same well; two grants in five years, then step aside. Reserve real percentages, not token panels, real money, for first and second features, documentaries, genre experiments, animation, and the filmmakers who don't get invited to the dinners where these things are usually decided. Publish who got what, because sunlight is cheaper than any accountability committee. And accept, upfront, that some of these bets will fail, that is what risk capital means, and a fund with a 100% "success" rate is just a fund that never took a single real risk. The establishment will survive without the money; that is literally what makes them the establishment. The market loves them, the banks know them, December belongs to them, nothing is being taken from anybody. But the kid shooting something strange and brilliant on borrowed equipment in Aba, the documentary maker in Jos, the animator in Enugu teaching herself rigging on YouTube, they will not survive on vibes, and they are the entire future of this industry. Every film culture that ever leapt forward, Korea in the late nineties, A24's America, the French New Wave before them, leapt because somebody with money deliberately funded the people the gatekeepers ignored. Nigeria's next leap is sitting in a rejected proposal in somebody's email right now. Stop funding the landlords. Fund the trespassers.