We just laid our hands on the speech that was delivered by the Governor of the host state to the BON awards 2014, Rotimi Amaechi and we will let you make your own decision as to whether or not Governor Amaechi insulted Nollywood. Read the full text of his speech below.....
"Let me state that this organisation is purely that of BON. If they were not my friends, they wouldn’t even have been able to use this hall because some government officials had planned to have a dinner or cocktail event in this hall, but I had to tell them to move across, outside. Not that I forgot or anything, but I thought you’re important to the Nigerian economy. You won’t like what I will say, but if you’re a student of English or Sociology of Literature, you would want to make this argument that some actors and actresses are products of necessity. Do you agree? (Audience responds: Yes). I’ve made that argument, and luckily for me, I would be leaving office in the next six months. When I leave office and I start research because of further studies, I’ll make a study on Nollywood. From Kenneth Okonkwo who has joined politics, to the movie, “The Meeting.” Watch “The Meeting,” you will see that it is the same line of the inability of the Nigerian elites to lead Nigeria out of the present comatose that we have found ourselves. Graduates would leave university after studying Engineering and become actors and actresses; just because there’s no employment. If you go to seek for employment, people are not employed based on merit, do you agree? You would see a Nigerian who is well-dressed and knowledgeable in the job applying for a job, and then, one fine young girl walks in, ‘This is a note from Governor Amaechi sir.’ So even if the knowledgeable person speaks all the grammar he knows, they have already made up their mind. Even in the banking industry, they employ 40%-60% beautiful ladies; you know why? Because they’re encouraging prostitution. As a governor, hardly do I see a banker in my office, but as the Speaker (of Rivers State House of Assembly), I was seeing quite a lot. One day, someone who used to work in a bank, walked up to me crying, and I said what’s the problem? He said, ‘Speaker please give me any account at all; they’re about to sack me. All the girls in my bank have gotten accounts, except me.’ He had passed across his message, and the message was: Please don’t encourage me to be a homos*xual. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong; I’m just saying he said that, ‘Don’t encourage me.’ I had to look for all possible means of giving him an account to save his job. If you look at your Nollywood industry; it first started as a protest literature. That is when you people came in and said, ‘We are tired of the current leadership in Nigeria; we need change.’ Then funding of the industry became a problem. The Onitsha traders and…what’s the name of that market again? (Audience responds Alaba, while some say Iweka). They were the ones that began to fund these films and determine the content you people were producing. You can no longer produce protest literature; if you do that, you’re affecting their market and they won’t sell. So you began to do juju, and for people like me, I stopped watching at that point. I watched “The Meeting” because Rita Dominic is a Port-Harcourt girl; she grew up in Port-Harcourt and she said to me, ‘Governor, please come. I knew Rita when I left University and was teaching briefly. Even when she produced it; to her, she didn’t know that what she was doing was protest literature: A Minister taking advantage of his position. How do we put it? Is it that he was manipulated by a girl, Nse, right? In his office, the professor, and the community leader were sitting down waiting, but Nse was able to go in. And to be able to go in, you must corrupt the secretary. I’m sure when she was acting all that, they never saw this part of literature. You moved from all those Juju things you were presenting, and you started to present social issues; not necessarily politics, and you also lost some of us. Occasionally, some of us would see one or two of those things you do in the movies, but believe me, Nigeria is not the same; it’s a very difficult country. It’s a country where there’s no middle-class; you think you’re a middle-class? A middle-class is a class that is sustainable after you have taken away your monthly expenditure, or a budget. There’s no Nigerian that has a Monthly Expenditure or a Budget. If you have a budget, raise up your hand. Let’s say I have a budget that I and my wife would spend N500,000 for the month, and then some friends would just walk in and say, ‘Hey, we came to greet you; we want to eat.’ Where they in the budget? (Audience laughs). So the man that you say is middle-class, after taking care of his immediate family, he still has the extended family to take care of, so he falls back immediately to poverty. In Nigeria, you’re either poor or rich. However, the good and bad thing about Nigeria is that you can be poor today, and tomorrow, you’ll be a millionaire. (Someone says ‘Amen’ in the audience).
But that’s wrong; don’t claim it. How do you become the millionaire? Nothing of your own expertise. You just walk into the office of the governor, and say ‘Your Excellency, God bless you. Nobody has governed like you in this world. Even the other time, I saw you with Obama. He’s your age-mate; and you’re even doing better than him. What swag does he have that you don’t have?’
Have you seen a country where we don’t know how many barrels of oil we produce and how much it costs? You know, I know there are press men here with cameras; I can tell you that I was in a meeting with the 36 state governors, and the president too was seated. The Minister of State for Finance was also seated. The GMD of NNPC and the Minister of State for Petroleum were able to tell us in the meeting that they take their money, not from the Federation Account, but the JP Morgan account of the NNPC. But we said no, that’s wrong. The law states that all revenue that is accruable to the country must first be paid into the Federation Account. This is so that when you bring your budget, you’re going to tell us how much it cost to produce one barrel of oil, then when it’s approved, they give you the money. But here, they don’t do budget, they collect it upfront. Some of you are products of necessity and poverty; not all of you, but 40%. I listened to Basorge at Kate Henshaw’s 40th birthday ceremony. He was telling her that he remembers those days when they used to trek, and when they couldn’t find jobs, they went into acting. Why am I saying this? If you have the opportunity to write a script and direct a movie, you owe the society the duty to be our mirror. It may sound like Greek to you, but the society is so bad now that we even question God. There’s something I said to my young friend, Wale, today on my Blackberry. We’re Nigerians; we want change, but we’re waiting on God to change the country for us. God is not going to come down and change the country; only us can do that. I thought that the Federal Government was contributing N200m to assist all of you; well, if they’ve not done that, too bad. For me, as a graduate of Literature, from time to time, I’ve told my friend Mrs. Joke Jacobs…I gave her an assignment to go and produce for me, “A Man of the People,” written by Chinua Achebe. That’s the best book I’ve read about the political class; he criticized the Nigerian elite. I’m a very lazy reader, but it’s the only book I can read from the first page to the last, and you’ll be laughing from the beginning to the end. Apart from satirizing the leaders, he also satirized women. You need to show the society why we need to go back to protest literature. There was a time I watched one movie from the beginning to the end because of the message. Those of you that have done movies like that, I praise you. If you’ve done that for Nigeria, you have created employment for thousands of Nigerians, and in doing that, you have brought out the creative side that you have. I thank all of you, but I say to you that it’s not enough, you have to force change. I did not join politics because I wanted to change Nigeria; I joined politics because I was hungry and there was no employment. It was in the course of service that I now saw the need to serve Nigeria. Two years after I became Speaker, I felt it was enough, and had to focus on Nigeria. Now, we need to force people who are stealing our money out of office. Maybe you don’t know how bad it is…let me tell you how bad it is. Rivers State government is to receive about N25bn per month, but we’re now getting N12bn. Our payslip is N9.2bn, and I asked a question: the benchmark for the budget is $75 per barrel, so we’re not down there yet, so why is the bill so scanty. So many states are owing salary, but don’t worry, we’ll be having elections soon. Watch what would happen. And now, it’s $86, watch what would happen if it falls further. Yesterday in Abuja, I saw Nigerians queuing in front of the Malaysian embassy for visa. I asked someone what was going on, and the person said that some Nigerians are going to Malaysia to donate one part of their kidneys. God bless you. Thank you.”
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