A Ugandan content creator who goes by the name Gladys Simpo has not stopped telling the story of her experience in Nigeria since she returned home after attending her friend and fellow content creator’s wedding in Ebonyi State.
Gladys (I follow her on Facebook) visited Lagos, Ebonyi, Anambra, Enugu, Plateau States, and Abuja before returning to her country. I have been watching her videos since her departure, and she has continued to show her awe-inspiring appreciation of what surprise Nigeria had for her. From her stories, she had been to Nigeria before, but it doesn’t appear that her first visit was particularly memorable.
Before embarking on her second visit, she said in her appreciation video, thoughts of the banditry and political corruption that have conspired to become the loudest of Nigeria’s stories were uppermost on her mind. As far as she was concerned, Nigerians and Nigeria present conflicting impressions. The Nigerians she met and interacted with during her visit were apparently different from those she had encountered in the media: while the former were kind and hospitable, the latter were hostile.
I will return to this later, but let me try to present the second story. A content creator, apparently in Burkina Faso, shared a video in which he interviewed a Burkinabe woman. The interview was on the countries she loves in Africa. When asked if she loved Nigeria, her answer was a straightforward “No”.
Her reason for not liking Nigeria? She said something undecipherable, but the interviewer assisted her to provide some clarity by asking her if she meant “sorcery”, to which she responded with a very clear, “yes”.
The interviewer followed up with another question of whether she had visited Nigeria before, and her answer was an unfortunate “no”.
If she had not been to Nigeria before, then how did she conclude that the country was a nation of sorcerers? All my readers would surely guess the answer correctly; she has watched Nigerian movies so many times that her opinion of the country had been formed – we are all sorcerers! The rituals in our movies and all the funny things we infuse into our entertainment exports contribute massive doses to the stereotyping of the country in a negative.
Political corruption may have been impeding our progress, but Nigerians are hardworking and innovative. In the years of yore, we were the nation where, during the civil war, a section of the country manufactured vehicles, built and operated refineries, bombs, and all manner of weapons.
Nigerians have recently produced some of Africa’s tech unicorns. Out of Africa’s 10 or so known unicorns, six are from Nigeria. Flutterwave, Moniepoint, Interswitch, Opay, Maser, and Andela were founded in Nigeria, and apart from Opay, which has foreign origins, the rest were created from scratch in Nigeria by Nigerians. With a collective valuation in the north of N12 billion, if you include the soonicorns, which include businesses like PalmPay, Kuda, and a few others, these businesses are stories that a vast majority of Africans don’t get to hear loud enough about Nigeria. They should be travelling around the world in our movies, influencing and changing perceptions, and retelling our stories in more constructive ways.
Nollywood doesn’t see these stories and others that tell the stories of the real people, real Nigerians.
As the Ugandan content creator observed, hospitality occurs naturally to Nigerians. We are naturally kind and hardworking; we are accommodating to visitors and strangers. But this does not feature as prominently and as frequently as it should in the theming of our movies to draw the attention of other Africans who consume our movies quite voraciously, and believe the contents, chiefly about voodoo, are who we are.
Gladys Simpo said she was afraid as she prepared for her visit to Nigeria. The kidnapping and official corruption in the country made her afraid. She has to be. In a country where the government plays while its people are getting slaughtered in the den of kidnappers, a visitor should be afraid.
In a country in which the president couldn’t explain the risk of kidnapping in his own country, responding to a journalist’s routine question like he thought it was a joke; a country where the governors of southwest states gathered to celebrate their Ojude Oba festival when fate of teachers and students (including a two-year old) in their zone are not known, a foreigner should genuinely be scared.
The trouble is that these negative stories travel much faster and penetrate more deeply than any other good story. It doesn’t require much push before it gains a life of its own and travels at jet speed. It quickly digs a pipeline of connection unto the street narrative and folklore, enabling the creation of stereotypes, as the Burkinabe lady created about Nigeria she had never visited.
Nigerian leaders do not understand the power of information. They pretend as if they do not know the power of messaging channels independent of the establishment. For them, the National Orientation Agency and other government agencies should be able to handle the country’s information management.
How would they know that those things they refuse to do, which get into the news, the movies, the country exports, and the president’s reaction in times of national crises carry stronger messages than all the curated information emanating from government agencies?
Who would be convinced that the NOA or the National Reputation Management Group is doing a good job when Mr. President would speak gibberish while responding to a question on what his government is doing to solve insecurity in Nigeria? The relationship between insecurity and the sacrifice of a ram on Sallah day is like that between sleep and death.
Lanre Adisa, CEO of Noah’s Ark, a big advertising agency in Nigeria, said, in an interview with the Nigerian Tribune, that Nigeria has a management problem rather than a brand problem.
He said in the interview: ‘Nigeria does not have a brand problem. We actually have a strong brand, but what we have is a brand management problem. You cannot advertise yourself out of a problem. So the problem can never be solved by another government’s policy or slogan. For instance, Detty December tells you that despite these challenges in Nigeria, people are still coming. That tells you that there is something in that brand. It is not being triggered by the government, but by the people; from Afrobeat, Nigerian films, Nollywood, comedy, and our fashion. They are being triggered by the people. So, what should the government do? The government should not try to control it or get in the way. Rather, they should pave the way’.
Adisa was right. The government should stay away from directly interfering with some of the positives we have as a country. Detty December was not the product of any government; Nollywood was not initiated by the government; Afrobeat, the music genre that is ruling the world today, has no government hand in it. So they should keep their fingers off these, as far as direct control is concerned.
But what about corruption? What about insecurity? What about the rancorous politicking and clearly unjust judicial system? What would be the implications of accountable leadership on the Nigerian brand? Could that change the narrative?
It is a major problem when a group is tasked with branding Nigeria and discovers two critical areas of disconnect. The Nigerian people and their government behave like people of different worlds; while the people display love for one another and for visitors, the government behaves as if they have a duty to destroy the people, to make life as miserable as possible for them.
The major challenge for anyone tasked with this is finding a way to bring the government into alignment with the people. If he succeeds in achieving this, his job is determined: he won’t have a job, because once this alignment is attained, the country begins to send the needed uniformity of messaging and would no longer be in dire need of branding. The branding would thus emerge naturally and organically.
This can only happen in Utopia. The real world is certainly different. A person would still be needed to aggregate the universe of the country’s reputation collateral and determine which would help achieve which objective and position the country for which predetermined purposes and benefits.
Adisa, in the same interview, also said that a lot was going for the country, but there was a tendency to focus on the negative and forget the positive.
He said: ‘That is why I say we’ve got a strong brand, but with a brand management problem. It’s a very broad topic. It’s not going to happen overnight. It doesn’t happen overnight. You need to have a long-term perspective on how to fix the problem. Some countries have gone through this. Colombia and Rwanda did that. What did they do? They don’t question some things. They don’t become antagonistic. In Rwanda’s case, they embraced their reality. They started looking at things around them: Keep the place clean, keep the policy right, fix institutions, and when they did all of that, they started advertising. You can’t advertise first. Let us look internally. Policy must match our intention, the promises that you want to give the entire world; our policy must match them. When you start doing things that don’t really align with your policy, a problem arises. That is why I said the brand is very strong, but there is no brand custodian. We need a national brand council of sorts, not managed by a politician’.
Adisa danced around the real problem here. There is no way 24,000 brand councils could ever solve the challenge of a country in which the government and the people are talking and giving off impressions that are at cross purposes with each other.
A thousand brand councils cannot do what Simpo Gladys did with her honest impression about Nigeria based on her experience. Had she not visited for a wedding, she would never have known that Nigerians were not cannibals. She would have thought our government is not only corrupt, but they treat the citizens to dirty drills every hour of the day.
For one, Gladys, however, there are thousands of ladies from Burkina Faso who take Nigeria to be a sprawling ground of sorcery and diabolical ritual activities. People like these make up their minds based on our intangible exports through our movies.
Saying that Nigerians dwell on the negatives is like suggesting there could be a way to ring-fence the country, insulating us from the rest of the world. There is no way what we do here would not filter to the rest of the world. With the pervasiveness of news and social media platforms, this is a virtual impossibility. Brand custodians will not succeed in blocking negative vibes from the country from spilling over into other countries.
The Nigerian government must do much better. From the president to the last councillor, there has to be a change in behaviour that connects with the typical Nigerian characteristics that Simpo Gladys observed during her visit.
Those are characteristics that are capable of triggering repeat visits or, better still, the settlement of capital from a delighted visitor. Inaugurating a Brand Council by Mr President, whose behaviour is at cross-purposes with the characteristics of the typical Nigerian, would only do what the presidential spokesmen are doing and load them in a more expensive vehicle.
Those are characteristics that are capable of triggering repeat visits or, better still, the settlement of capital from delighted visitors.
