Agreed! What happens then? Do we say it doesn’t matter, that pirates can go on and do their worst? Does it make any sense to anybody, that the sources of intellectual civilisation and culture are being eroded on daily basis because the people who produce it cannot live by the works of their hands? What does that mean for the society? Are we prepared for the destruction of that kind of inheritance? Are we prepared to see books like The Passport of Mallam Illya and other books that nurtured young imaginations benefit people who had no contribution to it and the families of the people who are responsible for writing and producing of such books get nothing from them? I don’t know.
That is a violation of a human right and there is the National Human Rights Commission. Why haven’t victims of piracy approached that commission if they don’t feel satisfied with what the NCC does?
But what can that commission do? It will be interesting to find out and I will follow that up. But what I want to place on record is for Nigerians to realise that the production of intellectual property which is valued anywhere in the world is so undervalued in Nigeria; that the people who produce it, don’t get compensated. If it comes to a point that somebody feels he or she will have to leave the country in order to benefit from his or her intellectual property, then there is something wrong. And I don’t believe that this is a terminal situation or this is how it ought to be or how it will be. I don’t think so.
You are widely travelled and published as well. Can you share your experience with us in terms of the relationship between the writer and the publisher and how other countries are able to tame piracy?
It is a very tricky thing. If you look at, say, the 19th Century Britain and the United States of America, a writer like Charles Dickens had to go to America and read from his books, got paid and followed up on the pirating of his novels. He tried and asked people to pay him. Of course nobody wanted to pay. In the 20th Century, Russia, The Soviet Union plundered anything from everywhere in the world and simply published without paying. China has done the same thing. There is nothing new with what we are seeing in Nigeria. It’s just that at a particular point, the authorities intervened and made sure it doesn’t happen and it stopped. And when it stopped, then you have a better organised publishing establishment that gives regular reports to its authors and pays them. The publishers can pay authors royalty [and] after 50 years the copyright doesn’t exist anymore. Usually, in countries with small populations like Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands etc, books are subsidised to the extent that the national libraries might, for example, take the first 5,000 copies, which of course makes it possible for the author to recover. That means that whatever else is sold, the author gets his or her royalty. Also, the publisher can do another 5,000 which they can sell. In other societies, there are multiple prizes like best film or book in a particular language, in a particular genre, for example. This also helps artistes to survive. So, over a year, you might get about ten filmmakers getting extra money, ten writers getting extra money from short stories, novels, plays, children stories, picture books etc. The variety is there, the society contributes to it. So, these are the ways through which this kind of problem has been confronted in other places in the past. But not to do anything at all, for me, is what is scary about the Nigerian situation.
Sometimes the processes through which books get to the curricular of institutions are questionable?
But when you have, for instance, as we have had in this country, books by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Flora Nwapa, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, gone one way or the other into the educational system, however loaded or however empty that process is, the system has to be different. The point is that the reward that should go to the writer has not gone there. And we cannot generalise it on the basis of the corruption in the country. That is not the reason why something should not be done about it. What can be done about it is to stop it, to have laws that must be efficient, to have more prosecutions, more convictions and more exposures of people who do this thing. When you have a situation where the ports authority can auction a 40-foot container, you can’t blame the person who buys it because legally he has acquired it. What I’m saying is that at some point, we need greater intervention from government institutions to stop this crime.
Another means of piracy is the internet and it’s getting bigger here?
Yes, the point is that if you go on the internet to download anything, you have to pay for it, unless it’s free. And if it’s free, it will be written there that it can be downloaded free-of-charge. I don’t think you can take things on the internet like that. I know that at one point music was taken like that. But books are a bit more difficult to download from the internet without paying for them. But it’s true that it’s still easier to download material from the internet than it used to be through other means. I remember a book I wrote in 1982 on Caribbean theatre, I used to get payment from photocopies from those who photocopied it. My publisher used to send it to me in London, saying, ‘This is the money we’ve collected from people who made photocopies of your book.’ There are ways of tracking that, if somebody is interested.
It appears there’s no organisation in Nigeria that is working well, even the NCC
But the NCC is working. It could do better if it is well-funded, if it has better equipped.
There are more than 300,000 policemen in Nigeria yet the crime rate is still high. Do we need another 300,000 staff for the NCC to change its fortunes. Will it be better?
I don’t know. But what I do know is that the NCC has people who are very dedicated, who want to protect producers of intellectual property but who can’t do their work because they are hampered by under-funding and institutional support that they don’t have.
Some state governments are distributing tablets or new formats of learning to students. Do you support the call that we move radically towards the virtual book?
Whether one supports it or not, it will happen.
Are the structures in place?
The structures may not be in place but if we start using it, the structures have to respond and support it. Remember that when the cell phone started, the basic source of money was voice – receiving and making calls. That made that dimension of the business to be so saturated. But what are the service providers doing today in South Africa for example? They are investing in data. So, data becomes the main sale point. Whether in the office, home or wherever, you must now be able to download things. The infrastructure of course becomes more sophisticated and more able to accommodate that. It’s not that people are no longer providing voice services. No, they do but it comes with data. So, whether the infrastructure is there or not, it will meet up the demands and the needs of the consumers. There have been experiments around the world where eight-year-old kids are given computers with no instructions and people come back hours later and find those kids using these computers. It doesn’t matter whether you support or not, there is a match of technological advancement that will always democratise the process of information dissemination. But still, somebody has to produce the material, write the book which can be put on the internet which can be converted to e-books or whatever. That person still needs to be compensated.
You recently delivered a lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, in which you were concerned about how our indigenous languages are disappearing. With the internet isn’t the havoc done by western languages more serious?
You have to remember that five years ago, virtually everything on the internet was written in English 100 per cent. But today, that material is probably down to 40 per cent. Languages have become part and parcel of that form of distribution of information we talked about earlier. That is, even now, I can go to my computer and say I to want to use Google in Yoruba or Hausa or Kiswahili or IsiZulu and it will be there, telling me in these languages what to do next. To this extent, you are the creator of what you want to consume. The internet is an instrument and this instrument needs to be encouraged to take these languages. But what is the use of writing a play in Yoruba and it becomes a school textbook yet the money goes all to pirates? Why will you bother to write plays? Why will you, as Baba Sala do a film in Yoruba, it’s pirated, and you are ruined. You owe the banks and you have to sell your property. Why would you want to do a film in Yoruba or any other language for that matter? That is the implication of not curbing piracy. It’s the destruction of culture in any language. We are not doing enough to protect the property of the intellectual producers.
What about the issue of artistes not having access to loans and grants here?
The Art Council in Britain supports artistes. Goethe Institut supports artistes and so does the Alliance Francaise. All of these people set up structures to promote their cultures. We don’t have anything. So there is no active spending on anything artistic and cultural milieu. And if you don’t spend money in an area, you don’t get anything back because you are not investing. In the churches, if you don’t plant a seed, nothing is going to grow. Unfortunately, it has led to individual efforts; that is, writers and artistes using their own infrastructure but producing and giving to Nigeria one of the greatest bonuses on Earth. People in other places say Nigerian writers are fantastic, they are incredible, they can compete anywhere in the world. But our government can’t say we made it possible for them. Why is that so? Why are there no arts councils? Why don’t we have structures that will support art, support the distribution of books that will make it possible for a writer to say, “On this book, this is what I’ve made. In the next two years, I don’t have to worry myself about my domestic existential problems.” How many Baba Salas do we have to recreate before our society wakes up to the idea that we are destroying the basis of our culture?
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