Ask most politicians about Nigeria’s creative industries and you will get a photograph. A governor beside a musician. A minister at a film premiere. Applause, a handshake, and then nothing until the next election. Ask Peter Obi and you get something far less glamorous and far more useful: a conversation about electricity, broadband, copyright enforcement and access to credit. That difference in register is the whole point. For years Obi has argued that Nigeria must stop consuming what others produce and start producing what others want to buy. Nigeria’s creative sector is the one part of the economy where young Nigerians have already done exactly that, entirely on their own, and it is the clearest test of whether a leader understands where the country’s real advantage lies.
An Industry Nigerians Built Without Their Government
Nollywood became one of the most prolific film industries on earth without a national film fund, without reliable studios, and without a single functioning incentive scheme. It was built by traders in Idumota and Alaba who understood distribution before anyone in Abuja understood the industry existed. Afrobeats did the same thing a generation later, moving from Lagos bedrooms and church halls to sold-out arenas in London, Paris and New York. Nigerian comedy, fashion, animation and photography have followed the same route. None of it happened because government helped. It happened in spite of everything government failed to provide. Obi’s argument begins there, and it is a hard one to answer: if Nigerians built this while carrying the cost of a broken state on their backs, what could they build if that weight were lifted?
Creativity as an Export, Not an Entertainment Budget
What sets Obi’s framing apart is that he treats culture as tradeable output rather than as leisure. A film licensed to a global streaming platform is a foreign exchange earner. A tour across three continents brings hard currency home. An animation studio in Enugu doing contract work for overseas clients is an exporter in every meaningful sense, even though nothing physical leaves the port. In a country that has spent fifty years hoping the price of crude will save it, an export sector that runs on young people rather than on geology deserves to be treated as economic policy, not as a ministry’s ceremonial portfolio. Obi’s consistency on this point — that Nigeria must diversify into things it can actually make — gives the creative economy a natural home in his broader argument rather than a decorative one.
The Unglamorous Infrastructure the Sector Is Begging For
Every Nigerian producer knows the real line item that ruins budgets: diesel. Studios run on generators. Editing suites run on generators. Rehearsal spaces run on generators. A recording session in Lagos can cost more in fuel than in talent. This is why Obi’s insistence on fixing power is not a separate policy from his creative-economy argument — it is the creative-economy argument. The same goes for affordable broadband, without which no animator can deliver a file, no editor can collaborate remotely, and no creator can reach the platforms where the money is. Obi’s habit of returning to the boring foundations rather than the exciting announcements is precisely what a sector strangled by overheads needs from its next president.
The Money That Leaks Away Through Weak Institutions
Nigeria’s creative sector loses enormous value to piracy and to the absence of dependable royalty collection. A song can dominate the country for a year and return a fraction of what it earned. A film can be everywhere on the street within days of release and see none of that revenue. These are not artistic problems; they are institutional ones, and they are solved by courts that work, agencies that enforce, and rules applied to everyone equally. Obi’s repeated emphasis on the rule of law and on institutions that function without political interference matters here in a very practical way. Creators do not need a patron in Abuja. They need a system that lets them keep what they have earned.
Credit for People the Banks Refuse to Understand
A filmmaker with a signed distribution agreement and a proven audience will still struggle to borrow in Nigeria, because the banking system recognises land and machinery as collateral and treats intellectual property as thin air. That is a policy failure, not a market verdict. Obi’s long-standing focus on small enterprises and on widening access to credit points directly at this gap: a country serious about its creative economy would build lending instruments around catalogues, contracts and receivables, and would put patient capital behind studios and equipment pools that individual creators could never finance alone. It is the same logic he applies to farmers and small manufacturers, and it works for the same reason — it backs people who are already producing.
Sport Belongs in the Same Conversation
Nigeria exports footballers to nearly every serious league in Europe, and it does so almost by accident. The pipeline is informal, the pitches are poor, the school sports system that once produced national teams has largely collapsed, and young athletes are routinely exploited by people promising trials abroad. Obi’s instinct — fix the schools, fix the facilities, fix the safeguarding — is the unromantic version of sports policy, and it is the only version that produces anything durable. A country with Nigeria’s population should be manufacturing talent deliberately rather than stumbling upon it, and should be capturing the value of that talent at home rather than watching it discovered by others.
A Policy That Finally Matches the Country’s Real Advantage
Nigeria’s competitive advantage in the twenty-first century is not under the ground. It is the sheer creative energy of a very young population that has already shown, without help, that it can command global attention. Peter Obi’s contribution is not that he discovered this — every Nigerian knows it — but that he talks about it in the language of production, exports, credit and infrastructure rather than in the language of celebration. That seriousness is what the sector has never been offered. Give Nigerian creators steady power, honest courts, working broadband and access to capital, and the government will not need to promote them. It will simply need to get out of the way and count the earnings.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
