The recent consecutive deaths of veteran screen actors and pioneering directors have once again plunged the Nigerian creative community into mourning. Taiwo Ogogo Hasan, Olu Jacobs, Francis Duru, and Alex Ekubo are just a few of the actors Nigeria has lost this year. Social media feeds are flooded with tributes, archival clips, and eulogies celebrating icons whose faces defined the golden era of domestic film. Behind the ceremonial grief lies a recurring, bitter ritual: the frantic circulation of private bank account details, emergency crowdfunding appeals for medical bills, and public recriminations over neglected pioneers. The sudden passing of these cultural figures does not merely reflect natural mortality. It lays bare the brutal, exploitative terms under which Nigeria’s screen industry continues to operate.
Nollywood is celebrated as a multi-million-dollar cultural export. It secures prime placement on global streaming giants like Netflix and Prime Video, attracts high-budget cinema distributions, and generates billions of naira in box-office records. Yet this international visibility conceals a devastating structural fault line. The commercial boom remains concentrated in an elite corporate enclave of executive producers, streaming aggregators, and commercial cinema operators. The foundational talent, the veteran actors, scriptwriters, and technical directors who built the industry with VHS tapes and market distributions in Alaba, are left in penury. The sector operates without institutional health insurance, pension frameworks, or residual rights. Creative pioneers spend decades entertaining the public, only to face their final years dependent on charity and the goodwill of philanthropic politicians.
The failure of commercial expansion to establish collective welfare endowments stems from the informal, fragmented origins of Nigerian filmmaking. Informal video-marketers financed the 1990s boom and treated creative talent as disposable day labourers. Performers were paid one-off cash sums for their roles, signing away all claims to their work under oral arrangements or predatory boilerplate forms. As the market grew from informal market stalls into multiplex cinemas and Silicon Valley streaming servers, the underlying labour relations never evolved. Guilds such as the Actors Guild of Nigeria and the Directors Guild of Nigeria remain fractured by internal politics, weak leadership, and regional rivalries. Rather than functioning as genuine trade unions that negotiate collective bargaining agreements, these associations behave as loose social clubs. Guild dues vanish into administrative overheads rather than ring-fenced welfare reserves. When streaming investments poured into Lagos, guild leadership failed to establish mandatory welfare levies on productions or secure standard pension contributions. Commercial growth has created private fortunes for a handful of studio heads while the collective workforce remains unprotected.
The issue of creative dignity is tied to intellectual property enforcement and the complete absence of residual payments. In mature film economies, screen actors and directors do not survive solely on their last day on set. They rely on residuals: contractually guaranteed royalties paid whenever a film is broadcast, rerun, syndicated across borders, or licensed to a new exhibition medium. Under Nigeria’s Copyright Act 2022, performers enjoy moral and economic rights, including the right to share in the proceeds of the commercial exploitation of their performances. These provisions remain dead letters. Production houses routinely impose work-for-hire contracts that force talent to surrender future economic claims in exchange for modest initial fees.
The Nigerian Copyright Commission lacks the enforcement teeth and field monitoring mechanisms needed to dismantle these exploitative practices. Collecting management organisations within the audiovisual space are paralysed by leadership squabbles and regulatory disputes, which prevent them from collecting and distributing broadcast royalties. While terrestrial television networks, local cable operators, and video-on-demand services monetise classic Nollywood catalogues repeatedly, the artists who brought those characters to life don’t receive remuneration. A veteran performer whose work appears on screens across the continent each afternoon can easily starve in Lagos because the legal frameworks governing creative royalties are treated as theoretical concepts rather than binding economic instruments.
This systemic failure requires institutional intervention from regulatory bodies and trade guilds. The National Film and Video Censors Board cannot restrict its regulatory mandate to censorship and classification fees. If the board possesses the statutory authority to inspect films for moral propriety, it must exercise equivalent authority to enforce industrial decency. The board should make labour and welfare compliance a prerequisite for issuing distribution and exhibition licences. Any film submitted for commercial classification must carry verifiable proof that cast and crew members were engaged under standardised contracts that include mandatory contributions to health insurance schemes and workers’ compensation funds.
The guilds must also reform their internal operations. Fragmented creative guilds must unite into an audiovisual federation with the authority to enforce minimum wage floors, production rest periods, and mandatory production-insurance bonds. Guilds must establish an institutional check-off system where a statutory percentage of every production budget, theatrical ticket sale, and streaming licence fee is remitted directly to an independently managed welfare and pension fund. This trust fund must be ring-fenced from internal guild squabbles and audited by reputable professional firms to provide lifelong medical coverage and pension annuities for older talent.
The recurring spectacle of dying artists begging for dialysis funds is an indictment of Nigeria’s creative economy. A society that celebrates cultural exports while discarding the creators who birthed them engages in cultural cannibalism. The transformation of Nollywood from an informal home-video market into a global entertainment powerhouse cannot be considered complete while its creative pioneers face destitute old age. The solution does not lie in erratic crowdfunding campaigns or theatrical political donations. It demands a binding statutory overhaul of intellectual property enforcement, mandatory health safety nets, and institutional royalty collection. Until creative labour is protected by law, the Nigerian screen industry remains a gilded sweatshop that devours its own architects.