This is a partial call: Nigeria wants to privatize the Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC). Yes, sell it off; I do not think we need it. But if the nation does that, Nigeria cannot empower a private company to regulate the film industry. So, the nation cannot have it both ways: it either finds money to fund NFC OR it privatizes it and forgets about regulating the sector.
But because not regulating the industry is very dangerous, I will propose an idea: turn NFC into a public-benefit company (think of a farmers cooperative) where all the stakeholders in the film guilds co-own it. In other words, you allow the practitioners to self-regulate with one small department in the Ministry of Information overseeing everything.
In the NFC board, have representatives from film guilds, religious leaders, civil societies and the government. Funding the NFC will come from a special fee on all new films. With that, NFC will do its work and the government will not spend kobo funding bureaucracy.
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The Nigerian government has said it is planning to reform the Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC) through commercialisation so it can address its teething challenges and reposition it for improved performance.
The minister of information and culture, Lai Mohammed, said this on Monday while inaugurating the steering committee on the commercialisation of the NFC.
Mr Mohammed said the commission, which is expected to regulate and organise professional practice in the film industry, is facing numerous challenges, which include its inability to engage in commercial film production and its limited operational functions such as leveraging on the private sector-led growth of the industry.
Another challenge of the agency is its civil service structure that “comes with bureaucratic limitations, budgetary constraints and operational inefficiency.”
He said in order to address these challenges and reposition the NFC for improved performance, the federal government had engaged the services of a business development consultant to conduct due diligence on the corporation and the sector and recommend a strategy that is suitable for its reform and commercialisation.
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In what year did they set up the NFC, and what role was it playing then? How relevant is it today?
Again, why is it struggling, and what exactly do they want to privatize there?
They don’t need to hire any consultant for due diligence, once they answer these few questions, we can help them disband it, then reallocate any useful function it ever had; its assets can be sold off subsequently.
How many Nigerians are even aware of something called Nigerian Film Corporation? We joke a lot in this country.
No wonder we spend almost five trillion naira on recurrent expenditure, these are some of the entities we send salaries to, even the ones we don’t know their names or locations.
We have a lot of cleaning up to do, this is not how to run a poor country.