Star actor, Emeka Ike whom many Nollywood lovers and his numerous fans are expecting his comeback to the industry he dominated for many years, has released a bombshell…

“I’m not the only one who is missing in action. A lot of us are but perhaps I get noticed more because maybe I am most loved. We all parade ourselves as stars but we know stars have levels.”

“Away from that, I am not the only one involved. Have you bothered to ask when last you heard of Oba Iweka road or of Idumota or Pound road in Aba? That was the last time we stopped being paid.”

“As you can see, the investors in the movie industry (Bayowa Films, Remmy Jes, Kas Vid) have been run over by the TV houses, no thanks to some of my colleagues. Nollywood has been taken over and it is evident.”

“Of course they did. They sold out to the TV houses and that has become the Nollywood we now talk about. Nollywood now exists only on Africa Magic, owned by South Africans.”

“Meanwhile, while we were struggling to put the industry together, they (South African investors) were not around, but now they show our Nollywood movies and play their country’s soundtrack. They go as far as try to bring up their new faces and play him up with a stupid star and try to create a somebody out of him. That way they are building their stars, Jacob’s Cross, Tinsel and so on.”

“At a time, Charles Novia came boldly to say that very soon all the stars would be gone. This was because he knew what they had done. They had mortgaged the future of the industry making cheap benefits. There was a time we attended a conference in South Africa and these people (South Africans) were inquisitive, probing and wanting to know about how we make our movies.”

“While I was speaking like a patriotic Nigerian, arguing against letting our strategies out, some of my colleagues quietly sold out, exchanging cards and numbers with them.”

“Unknown to them, they were selling out. When I said then that Africa Magic was ripping actors and producers off, people said I was crazy, some of my colleagues were paid to put up words against my claim. Now, plenty of them have been forced out of the job, because people who pay and invest in the movies are no longer in business.”

“It got to a point all efforts to salvage the situation became impossible because there was so much politicking going on. First, their content provider, Emeka Mba was lobbied to becoming the DG of the Censorship board, not forgetting he was one of those who brought them into Nigeria.”

“Mba’s position paved the way for them and made their business smooth. They needed to close down Nollywood to make TV more viable than it was, and that was when Emeka came up with the idea of every producer paying a sum of five million naira before their movies could get to the market. That was how it started and gradually some started falling off and a lot more were arrested for defaulting.”

“Till tomorrow, I will keep calling Emeka Mba a criminal and I’ll never forgive [him] because he destroyed the interest of the industry for personal reasons. He was one of those who owned HITV, but shame on him.”
“Now there is no more Infinity Merchandise, P. Collins, O.C Affassons and other big names we knew in those days. Places where Nollywood movies were readily available, like Idumota, Oba Iweka road, and Pound road, Aba have been shut down, leaving only Alaba in existence.”

“Alaba; a place we all, as an industry, tried to close down. The invasion has been on for a long time, it has put the industry in a state of coma, and has finally killed it. Nollywood is dead and this is so because we are never going to have a big producer roll out money anymore or visioneers bring out money to invest.”

“What we are going to keep having are scallywags and cheap production assistants running around to see how to put ten faces together and see if they can make at least fifteen thousand jacket sales.”

“They are not asking the right questions. I stood as Emeka Ike and made over a million jacket sales, only me, without putting twenty actors on one jacket. The cheap illiterates amongst my colleagues antagonize me, and I don’t blame them; I blame myself for mingling with them. I look at most of them (colleagues) and I begin to imagine the content in most of them.”

“Most of them wear dark shades and parade themselves like they are more than they are. What are they worth when they don’t even know their rights in the industry, but go about posing on red carpets with dark shades and speak [with] some accent that was never properly learnt? All those are cheap ways of life.”

“These guys don’t ask questions about what we are doing as a guild or an industry, and the few that do are labelled troublemakers. That is the mentality in Nigeria. Gani Fawehinmi was seen as a trouble maker till he died, same as Fela. These are the people who bring about change in their communities.”