VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

CHAPTER IIRegulating mobility, reshaping accessibility: The production crisis and the piracy scapegoat.When the UNESCO report I mentioned in the introduction was published, the reactionsexpressed in the Nigerian press were contradictory. Some articles presented the news with asentiment of pride in the achievement of this result, but at the same time, the majority of the articlesalso underlined the risk of a premature celebration. To many, the publication of the survey soundedalmost ironic, considering that the industry was going through a difficult period of crisis (Awoinfa2009; Nzeh 2009). For instance, just few months earlier, the newspapers were dominated by articlessuch as “Nollywood is dying” (Njoku 2009a) or “Nollywood: Stuck in the middle of nowhere”(Husseini 2009), paying witness to the economic impasse in which the video industry hadprogressively fallen since the mid-2000s. The perverse irony of this situation is the result of theproblems that the industry traversed in the past few years, and it is strictly related to the specificityof the Nigerian video industry’s economic organization and the impact that the introduction of newtechnologies has had on it.As I have suggested in the first chapter, Nollywood’s economy and media format are the resultof the combination of specific material conditions, media experiences and technologicaltransformations. However, Nigerian economic and social reality has quickly evolved in the past fewyears, and the successful formula represented by early Nollywood’s economy is not able to interpretthe present Nigerian reality as well as it used to do. The crisis of production this chapter focuses onmay then be seen as the expression of this discrepancy, and the economic transformations that thevideo industry is undertaking can be read as the progressive adaptation of the video industry’sstructure to the new social, political and economic reality that have emerged over the past fewyears.As underlined by Jane Guyer, Nigeria has a commercial economy in whichat least 60 percent of the currency, once issued, never goes back through the bankingsystem again. These two economies – that in which the formal financial institutionsmonitor the entire money issue every day, and that in which 60 percent of it is nevermonitored again in its entire life in circulation – coexist, interrelate, and reconstitute oneanother (1997: 3).45