4 years ago, fresh out of the cosy world of a cushy agency job and into the wild of entrepreneurship amidst a recession, I was trying to get my content creation agency off the ground. Armed with only a couple of laptops, our talents and some skills we picked up off YouTube, my partner and I were trying to build Nova Nigeria out of my 2-bedroom flat in Bariga. I was the copywriting and audiovisual production guru while he was the 3D animation mastermind and together we were going to take over the world. Or
something.
Through a stroke of luck, we happened across what looked like a promising prospect – a paying client who wanted a 30-second animated advert for his new startup. Sizing up this guy from his swanky Victoria Island home and the Bentley Continental GT parked conspicuously on his driveway, we were certain he was a sure thing. There was just one problem – he did not want to pay the market rate for 3D animation, which at the time was something like N15,000 per second. N450,000 became N300,000, which became
N200,000 until finally we settled on a somewhat derisory offer of N150,000.
There was a pipeline of work, he assured us. We would work together and he would open doors for us. Our upfront payment, which was supposed to be N100,000 then mysteriously turned into N60,000 when I went to pick it up (cash, he insisted). And so we took our creaky HP laptops and got to work creating a 30-second video, which we duly submitted. Needless to say, we never heard back from him again and to this day, the balance never showed up. I did, however, pick up a very important lesson from this about intellectual property in this part of the world.
A suicide attempt and a puzzling question?
Without diving into the details of a story that has been rehashed in tortuous detail over the past week on social media, the lesson I picked up in 2016 reasserted its relevance. The crux of the conflict lay in the fact that a journalist who worked on a project did not feel that she was adequately recognised and credited for it when it became a barnstorming success. After an unfortunate sequence of events, it ended up with her in a hospital bed after attempting suicide – the culmination of one year of mismanagement of the situation.
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Putting aside the controversy surrounding the names involved in the project, it struck me that above all else, the cavalier disrespect for the sanctity of intellectual property has not skipped even those whose entire business model rests on IP. According to those with intimate knowledge of the matter, the journalist in question was coerced to participate pseudonymously or lose all credit on the project she had essentially pitched and created by herself. Reading this set me down an interesting line of mental inquiry.
What if it was not an audiovisual documentary, which is an intangible product? What if it was, say, a new type of battery that can power a Tesla for 1,000KM that is made from fully renewable and environmentally
friendly sources? Is the potential societal impact of such a creation more important than the societal impact that the documentary in question created?
Would anyone have dared to suggest that the genius scientist who basically invented this battery should either accept being credited anonymously or have his participation expunged from the record? Clearly not, but why? Both the documentary and the battery invention are intellectual property are they not?
So why the double standard?
If you can’t see it, it isn’t real?
My hypothesis is that because the result of the battery research is a tangible item which one can see, and which has an easily measurable impact, the intellectual endeavour behind it is respected more than
that of the documentary. The documentary’s only projected metric for measuring its impact was probably YouTube views and media coverage. Beyond that, its entire usefulness is largely intangible. How many female students have been saved from molestation at the hands of Nigerian university lecturers as a result of that documentary? Definitely quite a few, but also impossible to measure with any kind of reliability.
Essentially, once the “product” that comes out of the intellectual creation process is not tangible and does not lend itself to metrics that a trading chart can respond to, it is simply not respected as much. This is a problem globally, but especially in this part of the world. The idea that something which is created, stored and consumed in kilobytes and megabytes is a valuable product in the same way as a can of sardines or a
television, has just not taken root here.
A trip to one of Nigeria’s many computer markets reveals a plethora of pirated software burned onto DVDs displayed openly for sale. If you were to steal a phone or a laptop from a shop at said computer market and you get caught while trying to sell it in an open suitcase at the roadside, you might very well lose your life on the spot. If you do the same thing by stealing information stored on the laptop or phone with a USB thumb drive and burning it to a DVD, somehow all of a sudden that is different? Why?
Clearly, because the laptop has weight and occupies space, this must mean that it has value. The information on the laptop might objectively be worth multiple times the value of the laptop itself, does not have the characteristics of matter, ergo it does not have value. This mindset filters through every layer of how IP is handled in Nigeria, down to TV producers unceremoniously yanking named credit off a
young journalist for her own work. It’s just a video at the end of the day, like a compilation DVD at Otigba Street. It’s not real. It doesn’t have value, unlike say, a laptop.
IP creators must respect their work – because nobody else will
Going back to 2016, the client in question actually got back in touch to demand a series of edits and changes to the video while bringing in a new work assignment and making our completed payment for the
first task contingent on doing the second one. At this point, I finally woke myself from my dream and told myself the truth – this guy did not respect us or our craft. He was never going to pay, not because he couldn’t do so with the flick of a wrist, but because he did not see why he should.
Consequently, I proceeded to write a lengthy email declining all requests for edits and the new work tasks. In the email, I informed him that despite being young, broke and naive, we did not want to have anything to
do with his likes anymore. For added petulance, I made sure to point out that his house on Victoria Island was less than a kilometre from one of my family’s properties on said Island – you’re not all that, big guy. It didn’t especially do much, but it did at least give my shoulders a bit of swagger as I drove my Kia Rio off into the figurative Lagos sunset, crossing an important psychological barrier to how I treated my creative output after that point.
From that point, I learned to stop bargaining over my work pricing excessively. I learned that IP with intangible products is simply not valued by default, so you have to make people value it. You do that by giving a price range and sticking to it even if the potential client walks away. By not doing “favours” and “just-this-one-time” for people. By putting up a wall of calculated arrogance around you so that human psychology dictates that people hesitate to disrespect you overtly or inadvertently.
I especially learned to always jealously retain credit for my work after it turned out that the Non-Disclosure Agreement effectively forbade us from using the work that we created to market ourselves openly.
Later on when the partnership fell apart and the agency became defunct, I learned to draw very thick boundaries around my written work and – very loudly – call out fellow writers who liked to “borrow” pieces of my work without crediting me.
And that is the story of how the worst N60,000 I have ever made literally changed my life.
