Nigeria is Still Far Behind South Africa in Film and TV Productions

 

Nigeria is Still Far Behind South Africa in Film and TV Productions

South Africa has the biggest film industry in Africa, followed by Egypt and Morocco in terms revenues in international film distribution and acquisition.

From the Academy Award winning "Tsotsi" of 2005 directed by Gavin Wood that grossed more than US$11 million from a budget of US$3 million to "District 9" of 2009 directed by Neill Blomkamp that had four nominations for the #Oscars. The film made more than  US$210 million from a budget of US$30 million.
There are several other outstanding South African films of global success.

Omo Ghetto: The Saga: The highest grossing Nollywood movie of all time so far made less than US$2 million from the box office. 

In spite of the popularity of sociocultural phenomenon of Nollywood, the first indie film industry in Africa ranked as the second largest film industry in the world after the Bollywood of India and ahead of Hollywood in the quantity of movies produced annually, we are still waiting for a Nigerian film that can make up to US$5 million from the box office or qualify for nominations at the Academy Awards, Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival.

 

When it comes to TV, of course the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is more advanced than the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), both in content,  programming and administrative management in structure and manpower. Without Multichoice in Nigeria,  both the local public and private TV stations are lagging behind South African TV stations. The private TV stations in Nigeria don't produce enough programmes and the programmes are often running without any proper programming. And the programmes have discordant audio caused by bad audio boards or incompetent audio engineers.
No need to discuss the quality of the TV productions with bad sound.
They have badly produced local movies, documentaries and reality TV shows, because of low budgets and insufficient revenues to produce or buy premium content. So, they resort to having cheap content of low quality.

There are more entertainment on some Nigerian blogs than the local private TV  channels in Nigeria.  And they even  compete for bragging rights to winning local TV awards with programmes that cannot be sold internationally.

- By EKENYERENGOZI Michael Chima 

Publisher/Editor, 

NOLLYWOOD MIRROR®Series 

247 Nigeria (@247nigeria) / Twitter

https://mobile.twitter.com/247nigeria

https://www.amazon.com/author/ekenyerengozimichaelchima

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