/ 11 December 2008

Africa’s movie factory foreman

Many foreign business people find Nigeria an enigma, offering as many opportunities as it does risks. For some companies the costs outweigh the pay-off, while those who dare to operate in the densely populated country prefer to do so from a distance.

For some time Joseph Hundah, newly appointed as managing director for MultiChoice Africa operations, headed the sub-Saharan desk from Johannesburg before relocating to Nigeria early last year to be the country director. “It didn’t make sense to run Africa’s operations from South Africa,” he says matter of factly.

In the almost two years that Zimbabwean-­born Hundah has been in Nigeria it has been hectic. Multi­Choice Africa lost the lucrative rights to broadcast English Premier football to the rest of the continent and last year it was fined N10-million (less than a R1-million) for showing “pornographic” scenes on Big Brother Africa. On the plus side the company launched Africa Magic Plus, a channel dedicated to movies made outside Nigeria, while the original channel, the hugely popular Africa Magic, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.

With more than 120-million people, the middle-class market in Nigeria is potentially Africa’s biggest. World Bank estimates indicate that sub-Saharan Africa’s middle class will top more than 40-million by 2030, and Nigeria is certain to contribute significantly to this figure. Currently MultiChoice has about 2,3-million subscribers — 1,7-million of these are in South Africa and 600 000 in the rest of Africa, mostly from the oil-rich states of Angola and Nigeria.

Hundah says Africa Magic Plus (channel 115 on the DStv bouquet) was launched to be a “catalyst for content creation — outside Nigeria”. When the channel was launched in June “we literally had to go to the market. But now people are coming to us with their movies.”

While the Nigeria movie factory spews out hundreds of movies every month, Hundah says other countries have also been busy, notably Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. Apart from providing yet another platform, Africa Magic Plus is the channel for African movie purists, showing well-produced movies from Algeria to Zimbabwe. The films shown are sophisticated and there is less of those hackneyed plots, driven by superstition and happen­stance, that are so typical of many Nigerian movies.

While Hundah may have some reservations about Nigeria’s movie-making, he finds its commercial model compelling. “Movies from other countries may be more highbrow, but this doesn’t necessarily make it more popular. Ultimately we have to put out what works for the audience.

“My purist side says ‘let us make movies that are beautifully shot’. But my more practical side says: ‘who’s going to afford that?'” he says, adding pointedly, “how many [Ousmane] Sembenes are out there?”

Yet Hundah finds Nollywood to have “improved dramatically” in the past five years in a process akin to natural selection. Sloppy movies have not been well received by audiences and a continent-wide platform has invited introspection and national pride. “They are worried now about how the rest of Africa will view them. It can’t only be about superstition.”

MultiChoice has played no small part in these developments. It has facilitated teaching of editing, distribution, scriptwriting and other aspects of the filmmaking business across the continent. For instance it invited 20 producers from Nigeria to sit on the set of Egoli to see how local practitioners go about it.

South Africa’s technical expertise is way ahead of the rest of the continent, yet already with a near saturation million-plus audience, rapid growth is most likely to come from the rest of Africa. One way MultiChoice is growing audiences is customising content to suit diverse local tastes.

“Customisation is critical,” Hundah says, hence there is MNet for Southern, West and East Africa. After snatching the Premier Soccer League’s rights from SABC, Supersport launched a dedicated football channel, Supersport 4. Likewise, in Nigeria they are working on launching­ a dedicated local football channel early next year “to familiarise Nigerians with their own league”.

“Will MNet then replace the local broadcaster?”` I ask. “You can never replace them, but we’ll want to be as involved in local content as they are. If football is that vehicle, well and good,” the Liverpool football club supporter says.

The music talent show Idols and the reality show Big Brother Africa are other vehicles the company is using to reach out to audiences. The little that I saw of the preliminary rounds of Idols was at times quite atrocious, but Hundah still reads a sense of pride of ownership. There is an attitude that declares, “it might not be as good as what the Europeans are doing, but it’s ours”.