No Country for Girls

By Ose Oyamendan

It takes a lot of work to be a Nigerian outside the country. It’s easy if you’re one of the legion who does not see anything good in your country and is always eager to grab a microphone and broadcast Nigeria’s rot. But if you love your country, like I do, and seek to defend it everyday, it can be like a man in the jungle batting away mosquitoes. Sometimes it feels like the country is a tap where bad news continually drips out.

You can understand my unease when, after several weeks of prodding, I finally decided to meet a small group of foreign film journalists to talk up the Nigerian film industry. It’s been in the works since before Christmas but I’d danced around it. I’d dug myself into an event called NOLLYWOOD IN HOLLYWOOD and now the time had come to talk about it to these folks of the pen and camera.

When you talk about cinema, you have to talk about the government and how it supports and promotes it. Cinema is big business the world over. It’s where cultural wars are fought and lost. And Hollywood is the command headquarters. That’s why everyone comes here to present their cinema. But, I always get the impression that our cultural leaders do not get that point. In the last few months, I’ve sort of confirmed that.

Our cultural leaders do not understand the simple fact that there is a cultural war going on in the world. No country wants to make Nigeria look like paradise because it means their loss of tourism dollars. The western world understands Nigeria’s cultural potential better than Nigeria’s cultural leaders. They know once the world knows of Nigeria’s cultural heritage and that it is a safe place to go, Nigeria will be a tourism mecca.

It explains why every now and then, the foreign media splashes Nigeria’s rot for the world to see. Like CNN denting Nigeria’s image a few days ago with a piece on human trafficking that’s been flogged to death but not showing the world the streets of Detroit where more lives have been lost to violence in two years than during the entirety of the Boko Haram scourge. I wouldn’t be surprised if the laundering of our national image has been contracted to the same CNN.

I stepped into the meeting feeling excited. It’s always a pleasure talking up Nollywood. I always think of those in the industry as folks who managed to pull water out of rocks. This was an opportunity to help.

Less than three minutes into the parley, a waitress turned on the volume on the television near us. There was breaking news from Nigeria. When you see breaking news from Nigeria, your heart skips. It’s never good. Today, it was worse than bad. Scores of schoolgirls in Dapchi had been abducted from their dormitories.

Every television in the lounge was tuned to news stations and they were all showing the breaking news. People left their meetings and meals and gathered around the screens in disbelief.

You hope this is someone’s bad idea of an April fool’s joke. You wonder how this could happen when Chibok is still a stench Nigeria is trying to deodorise. You ask yourself if this is not the same Boko Haram that the government claims it had wiped out. You are baffled because Boko Haram’s leader has resurrected at least thrice by the accounts of the Nigerian military. Even Jesus Christ only managed that once.

Finally, everyone drifted back to their seats, most of them wondering loudly what kind of country allows its schoolgirls to be kidnapped by terrorists not once but twice. Some wondered if some kidnappings have even been swept under the rug. No one there would buy a ticket to Nigeria soon.

The friendly journalists with tape recorders a few moments before were now executioners with tape recorders. The talk about the culture of a cinema industry that has fought hard to stand on its feet turned into a discourse on the culture of systemic rot in the self-styled giant of Africa. You know the foreign media is not fair when it comes to bad news out of Africa. They pound it with the ferocity of a muscular guy at a roadside buka pounding a stubborn yam into pounded yam submission.

Thankfully I have those handlers that I used to hate when I was a reporter. They refocused the meeting and questions and Nollywood may yet have its day in the Hollywood light. As I left the lounge, a chap walked up to me mournfully and said, “sorry about Nigeria.” You want to say something, leave a better image that is not sorry in his mind. But, you really have nothing to work with. God gave you a country that should be the pride of the black race. But somehow the leaders have contrived to turn it into a sorry nation.

– @iam_ose