Executive Director (ED), National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB), Dr. Shaibu Husseini, has said Nigeria is no longer taken seriously because of lack of data.

Speaking to journalists in Lagos, he said: “I took over a board that has about 465 staff, with six zonal offices, and 26 state centres. The staff are passionate, dedicated, and willing to work; all they need is some form of leadership and for some, an understanding of what the board is supposed to do. So, my coming to the board is to find a way to solve the problem.

“The board would be 30 years old in June. We started operations in 1994 with Demola James.
In June, we will present three publications to the public, each one to mark 10 years of the censors board. This is also because of the cry for data. We have received information from universities, both local and foreign, asking us for films that have been classified and other information. These publications will contain information on all the films that have been classified from 1994 till date. It is for documentation and it will outlive us. Hopefully, we will have a big celebration if by that time we have moved to a new headquarters in Abuja. The current one is a rented apartment we have been using since 1998.”

According to him, “my idea of the headquarters is a place where we can celebrate the stakeholders that have brought their films there to censor. We will have something like a Hall of Fame where names and photographs of people, both living and dead would be there. But you cannot do that in a rented apartment. I have made a proposal to the Minister of Art, Culture and the Creative Economy of Nigeria, Hannatu Musawa. She has said that we will move out of that place and get a space that will be christened ‘The Classifier’.”

He continued: “My dream is for us to move to ‘The Classifier’ and present a place we can call a house of film and creative content. We need to think more about classification than censorship. What has angered most of our stakeholders and kept them away from the board is this issue of censorship.

“When I checked all around the world, I discovered that they have moved from censorship to classification. Even in Britain, it is the British Board of Classification. In Kenya, it is a classification board, the same thing in South Africa. So, I sat with my management and we agreed that it was time for us to move from censorship to classification.

“The second thing that we have agreed to do is that we need to move with the age we are in now from analogue to digital. We should no longer be doing analogue at a time when we should be talking about digital, and we have agreed to digitise the process.

“Our digitisation of the process is also not about revenue, because some think it is an opportunity to take money from skit makers and others. It is about data.

“I found out that one of the reasons people are bypassing the board and releasing films without classification is because of the tedious process of getting your films on DVD, then you bring it to the board, they will then constitute a panel that will sit, and once it is 4.00pm, they leave whether the work is done or not. The filmmaker then waits till another day they meet and the cycle continues.

“But in the digital space, there is this thirst for content. If a man produces a film and plans to release it on Friday, if he brings it to the board on Monday, he expects to get his reply by Wednesday so that he can upload his film.

“For this reason, we have decided that we must commit ourselves to providing a service that will be convenient for the filmmakers to stay in the comfort of their homes, upload their films, pay online, see how the film is being processed, and then print their certificates online.”

He said: “One of the things with enforcement is that you must get your stakeholders’ buy-in. If stakeholders are responsible as filmmakers, we will not have any need to enforce anything. If they know that we frown at nudity or content that will divide us as a people, or anything that will threaten national security, or make Nigerians or Africans look less, then they will leave it out of their content. What we need is content that does not glamourise crime, ritual killings, or things that give us bad mad names internationally – we frown at these things.

“Another thing we are doing is to ensure that we carry out media literacy. When I took over, I centralised media literacy and made a department responsible for it. This is to educate the young minds being corrupted daily about the things that they can watch on social media or avoid.”

It is also to educate our parents and teachers on what they can do to protect the average child. What they watch and see registers in their minds, and as a parent, you have a responsibility. It is part of our mandate to go around and talk to them. We have also agreed that on May 27, Children’s Day, we will have a nationwide media literacy programme that we will sustain.

One of our flagship media literacy programmes this year is the August meeting in the Southeast. We are going to meet our mothers and tell them to care more about what their children watch. We will show them images of what the children are watching, and also introduce them to software that will allow them to know what the children are watching even when they are not there.”