Piracy Is Killing Our Culture - Omotoso

Writer, academic and public affairs analyst, Professor Kole Omotoso tells NKRUMAH BANKONG-OBI about the damage piracy is doing to the Nigerian creative enterprise and how it can be curbed. When did you notice that your book, Achebe or Soyinka: A Study In Contrasts, is pirated in Nigeria? [caption id="attachment_2394" align="alignright" width="300"] Prof. Kole Omotoso[/caption] One day in Akure, Ondo State, I was looking for something to read. I just suddenly found that I didn’t have enough material to read. So I went out to look, not only at the bookshops [the bookshops just sell mainly textbooks]. I went to look for vendors who sell other books. I found The Travels of Marco Polo. I bought it and I bought another book on the Presidency of Umaru Yar’Adua which, in fact, I found out was a pirated edition. And then I saw a copy of my book. I looked at it and I was sure that it wasn’t the original copy of the book. I bought a copy of it, too. I called the publisher later to find out what the situation was. I asked him if he was aware of what was going on, whether he knew about the piracy of my book. He said, no. That was how I found out and then I started inquiring about the whole situation of publishing and printing in Nigeria and the fact that quite a lot of people are making their fortune simply printing, selling and distributing published books that happen to be on the syllabus either at the university level, secondary school or any of the examinations, or even books for professionals like engineers, doctors, architects and others. And then there was that cry from Tunde Kelani, the filmmaker, about how he has been ruined by the pirates, especially with his film, Maami. That’s what really got me into working. Mr. Moses Olaiya, also known as Baba Sala’s situation so affected me to a point that at one time, I tried to contact him, to see what can be done in his case. But he’s been ill and therefore, he is not in circulation. But my worry is: why is it that we don’t have any structure in the country that can help artistes who lose out in this kind of tragic situation. I don’t know what can be done, whether there can be any relief that can be provided for them. There is need to do something. There is the duty regime that makes importers of books and book-related material pay high import duty for such products coming into the country. That encourages book piracy. Now, how can publishers, writers and all those in the book industry collaborate to curb the menace of piracy? I don’t know the state of the publishing industry in Nigeria anymore. Years ago, in the 1970s when we started advocating for publishing locally, it was because we wanted books to be easily available and distributable in Nigeria rather than books being published in New York, Paris, London etc without our people being able to have access to them. At that time, the input either in terms of access to paper or anything else could be understood. You had to, maybe import paper, ink and others. But today, I believe there are good enough printing facilities in Nigeria but which are being under-utilised. There are people who are prepared to go overseas, either to Dubai, to South Africa or they go to China or Japan to print and then they fly them in. But the people who are doing that are not the regular publishers or writers. They are people who do one-off kind of publishing – publishers of maybe memoirs, biographies or the self-gratification kind of publishing. So, I’m more concerned about the artiste who has no resource or other forms of earning a living except through his filmmaking or writing. In other societies, we can say they have structures that help to fight piracy. The laws are very clear and they deal with the issue of piracy. So, the artiste earns whatever he deserves in terms of popularity or non-popularity of his work. But we know that in Nigeria it is not the same thing. What is it that can be done? I don’t know but I’m just crying out of that loss we’ve suffered with the careers of people like Baba Sala, Adeyemi Josiah Afolayan being ruined, and what the family of Hubert Ogunde has lost as a result of piracy. There are some artistes in the film industry for example, who decide to explore the distribution of their works through the cinema before delving into compact disc production which are easy to reproduce by the pirates. But the writer doesn’t have that option. A writer gives his or her book to the publisher, the publisher does the publishing. The Ministry of Education then decides that they want to use it as a text book for schools. Then, the pirates decide, ‘Oh! There is money here’ and they go after it. The Nigerian Copyright Commission, NCC, seizes containers on a regular basis but they don’t have the resources to warehouse those containers. They don’t have the resources, for instance, to pursue the pirates. For example, if they were to pursue the person who pirated my book, they would have to go to Akure, start investigation involving the police or other security agencies. All of these things cost money and the NCC is under-resourced, they can’t pursue the pirates. But the publishers have an association and if they feel that that their business is threatened, they should collaborate with the NCC? Well, the impression one gets is that yes, the NCC has worked with the publishers’ association. But then, the NCC discovers that there are people within those publishing companies who liaise with the pirates and then launder the original editions with the pirated ones and sell to the public. So, it is a very intricate and complicated kind of business. And because it is private business, can one ask that government or some institution help to compensate artistes who lose in this business? Is it a valid expectation from a democratic society? I don’t know. I’m not sure. But we have a unique situation in Nigeria that people who produce intellectual property are not benefitting from it. I was told of a particular pirated edition of one of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels which carried the label “Beware of pirates, buy the original”. And these are pirates saying that. Writers like Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe and others lost millions of naira where you find, not only one but two, three pirated editions of their books. How long is this going to go on? It appears, from what you are saying, that the more popular a book is, the more prone it is to be pirated? Exactly! Are you saying that we should devise a means of compensating artistes based on the popularity of their works, since they are more likely to be harmed by pirates? I don’t know whether that is possible. That is what I’m saying. I used to think that the Nigerian Copyright Commission isn’t working. But speaking to somebody in the commission and getting the statistics on prosecution and conviction, I can no longer say that. Are you convinced by what the NCC says? If you have 45 convictions for example, over a period of time in a country of over 160 million people, does that number of convictions satisfy you? Yes, at least there are convictions. It is better now than that time when there was nothing done at all. For the first time, people are being taken to court and tried for piracy. But the punishment is so light that it doesn’t serve preventive purposes. It is not strong enough to make sure that people don’t do it again. Those caught can walk out with the 12 months or six months imprisonment term or a fine alternative, go home and do more harm. I don’t know whether it’s right to even say that we should have a commission which then compensates people whose works have been pirated. It doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. And it cannot exist in Nigeria. What needs to be done is that those who pirate intellectual property must be prosecuted vigorously and made to stop it. But some people will be quick to say that the piracy of intellectual property is a reflection of the general lack of respect for laws in the country? 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?