Piracy goes on in active connivance with people who are supposed to check it – Servio Gbadamosi

• Servio Gbadamosi, the publisher of Noirledge Publishing, says piracy goes on in active connivance with the people who are supposed to check it
• He also stated that the journey to building a viable and sustainable creative industry in Nigeria and Africa hasn’t begun  
• In the second of a three-part exclusive interview with TheRadar, Gbadamosi highlighted the challenges with the Nigerian education sector and the role of literacy in the preservation of culture and history

What are some of the challenges that the publishing industry in Nigeria faces, and what are the strategies to adopt to stay above water?

The challenges are too many to mention. The problems are too much. I say that there is no industry at all when you look at the way publishing is structured in Nigeria. It is a jungle and everybody is just trying to stay alive in the jungle. I think that one of the ways forward will be that we begin to build bridges between ourselves as publishers. Build bridges with people in the business world; people who have an understanding of how business works, because there is also the risk of a lot of people in the industry being creatives themselves without an actual understanding of how the world of business works. So, we need people with a business background; people with business and management training, who can come into the sector and bring their business acumen into what we do to help us become more profitable, better structured businesses.

There is no centralised platform for book distribution in our country as of now and I think it is something that we all as stakeholders need to come together to discuss. Yes, we’ve been having these conversations; we’ve discussed it at diverse fora, we’ve also discussed it in our own little words here and there, but I think that it is something that we all have to collectively come out to build because everybody is going to benefit from it. If we build a bigger pie, all of us should be able to get a bigger slice of it. Every publisher is building its own structure, struggling through it, enjoying the successes and struggling with the downsides and the frustrations that come with it. But if these are shared services, it will be a lot easier for us all; shared platforms collectively built and jointly owned, it would help in bringing respite to a lot of the issues that we suffer.

This is also an industry where, besides the human beings that work in the sector, every other thing is imported. Every single thing that is used in the book production process is imported into the country and that is sad. We don’t make the paper. We don’t make the ink. We don’t make the machines. We don’t make the detergents, the chemicals. We don’t make the film. We don’t make the plates. We don’t make the cards. We don’t make the paper. We don’t make the threads. We don’t make the glue and the things that are used in making books. All of these things are produced for profit in other countries and shipped or imported by us. So there is no way that will not impact the price of books and the cost of production. And that means, if you look at the low purchasing power that the majority of Nigerians have, it means that reading is a luxury. In light of the current economic realities, the average book in Nigeria now ranges between N7,000 and N20,000. Even for people who like to read, in a country where most states and employers are not even paying the recently approved minimum wage of N70,000, how many of that can you afford to buy in a month, that is, even if you are interested in reading.

So, we need to get to that place where we begin to produce locally a lot of the inputs that go into book production so that we can make these books more affordable. The more affordable they are, the more copies we will be able to sell with the right distribution and circulation mechanisms. When more people are able to afford these books, it means more of them get read. When more of them get read, we become a better society because the literacy rate will go up. The level of enlightenment will go up. We are talking about general reading now, not specialised reading or studying, because if you read, there has got to be something that interests you; it could be a magazine, it could be a journal, it could be a newspaper. There is always something you take away from everything you read. It could be of immediate use to you, or it could be something that will just lie fallow in your subconscious until the need for it arises and you bring that knowledge to bear and you make the best of that situation or circumstance that you are in.

The challenges are enormous. This is also a country that has over 15 agencies and parastatals of government at the federal level for the arts and culture sector. These are agencies that exist, but as practitioners who work in these fields every day, we barely feel their impact. So, we can say that the government is not doing enough. We can say that private individuals, who have deep pockets, have also not done enough. But then, I will also say that we as publishers, we as culture practitioners, as writers, as creatives have also not done enough to build this into a big and better industry for the benefit of everybody. So, there is a lot of work to do.

I am not given to criticism to say who is doing something right and who is doing something wrong. But then, this is a country of over 200 million people; how many prizes do we have for books? How many publishing houses do we have in all? We don’t have enough for the population that we have. How many schools do we have? How many good, quality books make it into the education system without some sort of patronage and bribery? These are all challenges. The relevant bodies constituted and funded by the governments, how much have they done to ensure the industry grows to fulfil its potential?

When we talk about the creative industry, what everybody talks about is Afrobeats, Nollywood, and fashion. Most young people don’t even know that there are distinct career paths that you can go through, through the education system or even outside of it, and be trained for. These are career paths that you can work in all your life, globally recognised, that have been on for decades or even centuries. But they don’t know because we are not educating them. We are not looking at building the manpower that the industry needs. We are not talking about these things. We have universities that are graduate production mills. A lot of these graduates do not have the requisite skills needed in the workplace, essential for success in the workplace. It’s not all about theories. Why should we still have long-outdated curricula being taught in some of the schools when new fields can be explored? When new aspects of the same age-old fields have also evolved in other parts of the world, and we have hundreds and thousands of people, knowledgeable people, producing good works in those fields, good works that can be reference points for our own vision, for our own growth. These are tough questions that we don’t like talking about.

We need to understand that it is time to build this industry by getting our hands dirty and doing the actual work of building it, not by paying lip service. Not by getting some sort of governmental or international grants, the majority of which we know would have no real-life or real-world impact on the sector. If we get money or some sort of leverage locally, nationally, or internationally, let it be directed towards making this sector better for the benefit of everybody. This sector can provide viable and sustainable employment to thousands of our teeming youths. But if we don’t grow it, they would have nothing.

When you talk about publishing, most people look at you and ask ‘What are you even doing there? How are you people making money? Do people read?’ But there is money here. It’s a social work; it’s an essential service that has to be rendered because every generation has to be educated. If you look at the Human Development Index of the developed world, you will understand how vital and pivotal to the development of that country the role of education, the role of writing, the role of literacy, the role of publishing, and the role of creative industries.

We still have that rigid divide between the sciences and the humanities in this country. Our parents say, ‘You do sciences, you do humanities,’ but these are lines that have since been blurred. These lines are no longer parallel; they have a convergence point and we have the rest of the world to look at as examples of the success of this convergence. There is a lot of work for everybody in the society to be done towards the development of the creative industry in this country. Your son wants to study medicine, your daughter wants to be a nurse, but your son or daughter can sing, is interested in playing a musical instrument, or is interested in going into a particular sport. These are things that can go hand-in-hand; they are not mutually exclusive, there is always a convergence point. It is not always black and white and parents who are raising children need to have this in their consciousness so that we don’t continue to perpetuate some of the anomalies that have given birth to the struggles that people like us currently experience.

Servio Gbadamosi asserts that literacy plays a significant role in the development and growth of any society. Photo credit: Servio Gbadamosi/Medium

What is your opinion on the reading culture in Nigeria?

This country has millions of out-of-school children and that tells us something about the people that we have entrusted with governance, education, and leadership in this country. I cannot imagine that in 2025, Nigeria will be one of the leading countries in the world with the largest number of out-of-school children. This is something that the rest of the world has moved away from decades ago. We have the Child Rights Act, which has also been domesticated by many states, and those states have hundreds of thousands of children who are out of school. Have you gone round some of these sorry things we call schools? Some of them have no buildings. Some of them have no furniture. Some of them have no roofs. Some of them have little or no teachers. Let’s not talk about the qualifications of those teachers; that’s a different thing. What percentage of the federal allocation goes to education? What’s the percentage that each state allocates to it? Again, we always throw stones at the Federal Government; we barely do the same to the state government and the people at the helm of affairs at the local government, but these people all have responsibilities. They are responsible for our collective misfortune in these areas.

People read, but how many of the people who love to read can afford to read? There’s an underground system for book sales in this country, for used books and second-hand books. I mentioned earlier that the average price of books published in this country is between N7,000 and N20,000. But that will get me one new book by a Nigerian publisher, most likely. If I take the same amount to a bend-down-select bookstore under Ojuelegba Bridge at Mile 2 – it is a constant feature in most of our big cities – I will get some of these books for N200, N500, N800, N1,000; different books, published in the West, some of which were supposed to have been popped, some of which were donated. I will get those books. Maybe with N10,000, I will go home with 15 books to read for 1 to 5 months. There is no way of tracking, except by interaction or personal knowledge, that I read those books.

People read magazines a lot. People read blog posts, they read on social media. They come across a lot of educational content and they consume these things. There are quite a number of people who are very knowledgeable in this country, and I mean young and old. So, I think it is a lazy argument to say Nigerians don’t read. The question is multilayered. For instance, I am in my late 30s and until I got to the university, I didn’t know what a library was. All the schools I went to didn’t have libraries. There was not a single functional community library in any of the places I grew up in Ibadan, the capital of the defunct Western Region. There was not one functional library that I could go to as a child. All the schools, primary and secondary, that I went to, didn’t have functional libraries. There was none in any of the communities.

When I got into the university, there was a community library that I came across at Ijebu Igbo and I used to go there; I spent most of my time there. Then my department had a functional library. That’s when I began to use the library. If I had schooled in a different place that didn’t have those libraries, maybe even as an adult now, I wouldn’t have known what it is like to go to a library and read.

So, you are saying people don’t read, have you provided the infrastructure that will spur them to reading? Have you done that? You haven’t! You can’t sow maize and reap cassava. You couldn’t have failed at providing the necessary infrastructure and then go on to accuse or declare that people are not making use of something that you have not provided. Provide these things first. And that’s why there is a lot of shallow thinking in our everyday life; a lot of shallow thinking in government policies, because you know that there is that poverty of the intellect, there is that mental poverty that a lot of people have. I am thankful that we are even a religious people because religion has been one of the last bastions for knowledge acquisition that we have in this country. At least people go to churches and mosques and rightly or wrongly, they listen to someone. Someone makes them read the scriptures on which their religion is founded. Someone takes time to teach or explain it to them so that they can go on to live better lives.

I think that the literacy rates are down, especially when you look at the younger population, but there is a lot of reading going on. It is not just structured reading that can bring about development in the society because for us to have the kind of structured reading that can bring about human development and societal development, we have to create the facilities and infrastructure for it. We have to teach reading and numeracy skills at an early age, we have to create libraries, we have to make books accessible and affordable. Yes, there are a handful of private bodies and non-governmental organisations attending to these issues, but the government has largely been irresponsible in this aspect, from top to bottom; from the federal to the state and local governments.

Reading and studying, literacy, education go beyond writing and passing exams because, again, that is one of the boasts that state governments make in this country. They say, ‘Oh, this was the level of success in WASSCE. This was the level of SSCE before I became a governor, before I became a commissioner, before I became a minister, now it has gotten to this level.’ That is one indicator; it is not the only determinant and it is a poor indicator because it is lopsided. You are not looking at the total education of that person; you are looking at that person’s ability to either pass exams or game the exam system. But when you are looking at the total education and development of the person, it is something that helps the person grow into a wholesome, rational-thinking adult. But I am not sure that the government ever wants us to get to that stage, so that we don’t begin to ask them even tougher questions that will hold them accountable.

What about the role of literacy in the preservation of culture and history?

As we say, a culture, a tradition, a religion that is not taught to the next generation will definitely fade from the face of the earth. Thankfully, in the past few years, we have brought history back to our schools. But I don’t know how well we have done because it already shows there are at least two generations of people online now who talk about and argue things that they should have learnt in history classes in their younger days and they don’t know these things, so they come up with all sorts of unsubstantiated claims. They claim, ‘This is the first person to do something. This is the first time that this will happen.’ I just look at it and laugh that some of these things you are saying this is the first happened 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago in this country; there are people who did it first. There are other people who have done these things, but because we didn’t teach that history… And I think we are afraid. For so long the government got us afraid because there’s a lot of division, there’s a lack of trust that we have for ourselves as ethnic nationalities pretending to be a nation and for that, they don’t want people to fully have an understanding of the things that had happened in the past because if they have that understanding, they can ask tougher questions. But then, if we don’t have that understanding, how do we reinvent ourselves? How do we face the challenges that the future will bring us?

There’s the concept called ‘Sankofa’ that the Akan people of Ghana have. Simply put, it means ‘to go back and get it.’ One of the ways in which it is depicted is to have a bird flying forward but looking backwards and with the egg of the future in its mouth. What that basically means is that for us to understand how we got here, we have to understand where we are coming from. What happened – the good, the bad, the ugly? What were the things that happened, rightly, wrongly? We are here now, how do we want to move forward?

As a country, we have been running away from that conversation. And that fear, that insecurity, and that distrust that we have for each other is stopping us from having that conversation, which is necessary for our healing and we are passing on this trauma to generations that knew nothing about the war, that knew nothing about the fights, the disagreements, and all. These people are not part of it, but we don’t teach them these things. If we can’t freely discuss these things amongst ourselves, how are we going to find healing? How are we going to be able to live with ourselves as a people?

So, I suspect, looking at Nigeria’s history, that was one of the reasons or the fears why History was taken away. And this History that has been brought back was brought back after like two or three decades of not producing History teachers and you just developed a curriculum, put it in the school system and give instructions and say, ‘You, go and teach this; you, go and teach that.’ How many schools do you even know that have History teachers, that offer History as a subject?

The custodians of culture in each society have largely been the elders and the urban lifestyle that we live now, the quest to stay alive, the economics of it has detached or disconnected most of us from these elders who are custodians of our family histories, of our community histories and a lot of them are dying. There is so much we are refusing to digitise, so much we are refusing to document and that is why some African countries say that once an elder dies, a library burns to the ground. I think that maybe in another 10 years we will be able to see, rightly or wrongly, the results that the current teaching of History in our schools would bring.

But I think that as private individuals, the onus is on us to begin to document our family histories, community histories, and all. You have an uncle, an aunt, a grandma, or a grandpa. Have you sat down with them with your mobile devices, and say, ‘I want to put grandma, grandpa, uncle so, aunt so on record? Tell us, this family name that we have, who was the first person to take this name? How was this community established? Tell me what you know about my father. Tell me what you know about my mother. Tell me what you know about this town.’ If I do that for my family and the people around me, somebody else in my environment does it; let’s say there are a thousand people in that community, we are going to have maybe 200 or 500 versions of these stories documented. At some point, what we will begin to look out for will be authenticity and commonalities in these personal stories that we are trying to build into a community history. And then we begin to compare notes. But at least we are not allowing these materials to perish.

I think we have to embark on some emergency self-help mission to document these histories because how do we continue as a people without this understanding? These are the kinds of things that the creative industry also does. There has been a recent fascination with epic movies in Nollywood now. Everybody is doing it in one way or the other and they are getting either applause or condemnation for it. But I say yes, please let them do it, because most people don’t even know about these things. We can talk about how well or not the execution and storytelling were done; how historically accurate or not it is. But I like the fact that at least we are becoming interested; it’s a fair attempt. And then you will always have reinterpretations, representations, and reimagining of these historical facts and occurrences. Nothing stops us from having 10, 20, 30 representations or depictions of the same history. And in between all of that, scholars would be able to sieve and find the substance of it and we would be able to corroborate some of these claims if we begin to document our personal family and community histories.

Another challenge that the publishing and creative industries face is intellectual property theft. Could you speak to that and what is it like in Nigeria?

We can argue that the laws are inadequate when it comes to the protection of intellectual properties and intellectual rights. They are inadequate and offer somewhat inappropriate punishments to people who infringe on the copyright and intellectual property laws. You can say that the punishment is not commensurate with the offence or damage. But one thing that you cannot dispute is that in one form or the other, these laws exist.

First, what is our general understanding as a people of intellectual property rights? A lot of people don’t even know what these are. They come up with something, they create something, but they don’t know the agencies to even try the filing or registration of that thing. So, when somebody then infringes on that right, it becomes more difficult for them to sue for damages or even to lay claims to that thing, because what if the person beats them to the registration and documentation?

So, we’ve not done so much to educate the public about intellectual rights and intellectual rights management, documentation, registration, and all. Looking at the way that our legal and judicial system is structured in this country, these are things that are difficult to prove in court and often take an extensive and long period of time for the case to be established and be ruled on in court. I think that we need to do more to educate ourselves about these things. We need to know what the law that we say is inadequate currently provides for, so that, as minimal as that provision is – some would argue otherwise – at least we can get the benefit of it to ourselves.

If you look at piracy, it is a big money business. It’s hard for you to find a smallholder pirate; it’s almost impossible to find. It’s big business. A lot of money exchanges hands through it. They have connections in the security and paramilitary agencies of this country. For example, book piracy. Books are pirated and shipped into this country. We are not even talking about those books being smuggled in through land borders; they are shipped in containers and brought into this country through the standard, professional, and official channels. They are cleared and spread into the market. And then one day, the agencies in charge wake up. They go to one or two bookstores, one or two distribution points, they raid, they confiscate these things and set them on fire.

It is tokenism; it does not solve the problem at all and they know it. They know that people know this game by now. So, you arrest 1, 2, 3 merchants who, in a few days or a couple of weeks, would be back in their stores selling the same thing. The people who printed container-loads of these books and shipped them into the country live in their mansions; nothing happens to them. You don’t even investigate them; you don’t go after them. It’s the guy, the lady, who is unfortunate to have a few copies of them, which some of them can’t even tell apart; they are the ones who bear the brunt of this because they do not have people to speak for them in the house of power.

So, we are just paying lip service to intellectual rights management and all of that, as far as the book and publishing industry is concerned. A lot is going on and some of these are actively going on with the connivance of the people who are supposed to checkmate these activities. A lot of things are going on with their active involvement and participation. We’ve had enough of this tokenism, where you do a show of force and go raid a market and go. These things shouldn’t even come into the country in the first place.

When a publisher or an author reports it, investigations should be conducted. People don’t have faith in the legal system for seeking redress anymore, so a lot of these things go unreported. They try to seek arbitration. They try to see who knows who can talk to somebody and prevail on that person or beg that person to say, ‘After selling this one, abeg no print another one.’ That is how issues are now being resolved because you know if you go to the agencies, if they answer you at all, they will just come and do a show and after that show, it is recorded and broadcast in the media, you get nothing; you get no redress, you get no reprieve, so why should you continue reporting these things to them?

We need to keep enlightening people that these laws exist, inadequate as they are. We can push for the amendment of those laws or a total overhaul of those laws, but even the ones as they are presently constituted, let people know about them. Let there be that enlightenment that can make people begin to walk into these offices and begin to register their intellectual properties, file claims, and file complaints when they are infringed upon. You need that trust that where you are going to seek redress, at least your complaints would even be looked into, not like they are even the ones calling the perpetrators of the crime to say, ‘One stupid boy or one stupid girl came to report you’ and then the person comes after you and harasses you because they have money; they have deep pockets and they do have connections sometimes in government, sometimes amongst the security agencies.

Creatives deserve better financial outcomes – Servio Gbadamosi

Meanwhile, TheRadar earlier reported that Servio Gbadamosi, a poet, a writer, and the publisher of Noirledge Publishing, said creatives deserve better financial outcomes

In an exclusive three-part interview with TheRadar, Gbadamosi also stated that, though some of the works published by his firm have won notable awards, he intends to build the firm into a media powerhouse that is unafraid to take on and support bold African stories.