INTERVIEW: NFVCB is building virtual deck to digitise film rating process, says DG Shaibu Husseini

The National Film and Video Censors Board is in something of an existential limbo. Some policymakers called for its dissolution to integrate its functions into the ministry of arts, culture, and digital economy in the implementation of the Oronsaye Report which seeks to cut down Nigeria’s governance costs. Contrarily, lawmakers are fronting a bill before the national assembly to re-enact the board’s establishment law, guarantee its subsistence, shift away from censorship to allow filmmakers more creative license, and double down on regulating the movie streaming sub-sector that has long evaded government oversight in Nigeria. Shaibu Husseini, the newly appointed director-general of the board and successor of Adedayo Thomas, speaks to TheCable’s Stephen Kenechi about these issues and more.

Stephen Kenechi: You’re the new DG of the NFVCB. What’s your idea of regulating the film industry?

Shaibu Husseini: That’s what we’re set up to do. We classify films and video works. So films that are produced here or imported into the country to be exhibited have to be classified and rated by the board. We also do consumer education and stakeholder engagement. We try to ensure that we do less enforcement and more of getting people to do the right thing. We’re also out to balance the need to preserve freedom of expression as guaranteed by the law and the need to limit the sociocultural harms caused by films.

Stephen Kenechi: About doing less enforcement, how do you see Nigeria’s film industry growing into self-regulation?

Shaibu Husseini: It will. The problem is mostly that creative industry practitioners are apathetic towards regulation. They feel regulation infringes on their expressive and creative rights. I believe the more we engage with them, the more they will see reason to grow into self-regulation. As soon as I was appointed DG, the first thing I discussed with my colleagues at the Nigerian Film Corporation was that, if there is only one thing we want to achieve within our four-year tenure, it’s to ensure that we must hand this industry a self-regulatory mechanism. Of course, the government must always regulate different economic sectors, so it’s not like we would close shop as agencies. But stakeholders must be able to self-regulate so that we have less work to do and more effort devoted to other areas of our mandate like educating the viewers on the different ratings. This is to protect our young from potentially damaging content. We should not always have to run after filmmakers.

Stephen Kenechi: What does it take to regulate Nigeria’s film industry? What’s the scope of that?

Shaibu Husseini: It’s huge because Nigeria’s film space is largely upcoming and unstructured. You conclude talks with one group and another has already emerged and called themselves filmmakers. They have democratised filmmaking. Now with a 4K phone, you can be a filmmaker. Make a good one. A distributor picks it up. Tomorrow, you become a superstar. Technology has made it so easy that everyone is now a filmmaker. You can go directly from script to filming. This was not always the case. You can create content in your room and upload it. You don’t even need a distributor or marketer. And there is no single collective to which you can say all film people belong. NFBCB law demands that you have an affiliation for your film to be classified. You must belong to a guild that is not proscribed. We need these structures, so the industry is better organised. Even the guilds have members who still bypass NFVCB. We can’t police everyone but we’re getting there.

The scope is large but once we have self-regulatory structures, there will be less work to do on enforcement and more on engagement.

Stephen Kenechi: How will you work out this self-regulatory mechanism? Force all film and video content practitioners into a guild?

Shaibu Husseini: Not one guild. They have to belong to their respective guilds. But there can be a council or a collective association for all of us. Take the NBA for example. You can’t practice law if you’re not one of their members. They have a disciplinary committee to handle infractions. This does not happen in Nigeria’s film industry. An accident happened on a film set and a producer was suspended. They were asked to call off production but these people were still working. We’re not pushing for practitioners to belong to a joint guild. You can belong to your guild but let’s have association. China has different sectoral bodies and one association to which each body sends a representative.

Nigeria’s industry is a place where there are no standard contracts. People work and complain about not being paid. A council should be able to preside over that. In South Africa, you can’t go to their country and import people to work there. A council will meet, you tell them you want to take this decision, and the government will endorse it because it’s coming from a collective. The collective could say, “We want skill transfer. You can’t bring everybody to come here and do a production.” They could give you a quota and the government approves it.

In Nigeria, skit makers, producers, and musicians are all working at cross-purposes. We need a joint council where each sectoral group has a representative. The representative of any guild on the council doesn’t even have to be that guild’s president. That’s the kind of self-regulation I speak of.

Stephen Kenechi: I imagine that NBC oversees film content airing on pay TV. How involved are they or will they be in such a system?

Shaibu Husseini:  The NBC code mandates films to get NFVCB approval. You can’t air films at a broadcast firm without an NFVCB certificate. The broadcast firm typically asks us for verification. We work hand-in-hand with the NBC even if it is in the information ministry and we’re in art.

The broadcast industry has a code. We in the film industry don’t. There is no unified production standard. That’s what we’re trying to work out with the DG Ali Nuhu of the Nigerian Film Corporation. In Nigeria, it is easy to see that anything without a force of law hardly works. We’re trying to get government backing to have film industry practitioners set up this council by themselves.

Collective management organisations for music are successful models for these. We have the AVRS, COSON, and MCSN. Those bodies got their backing from the Nigerian Copyright Commission. It is in the statute of the NCC that these bodies be set up to collect royalty for musicians. These guys can shut down any establishment that doesn’t pay due royalties.

They can do that because they are established by a government institution that says they have the right to sue and be sued.

Such a council for film won’t work on its own. AVRS has its sceretariat and management. They do an annual general meeting to elect members. The only thing they do with the government is to submit an annual report. The government may withdraw their licence whenever someone tries to play games, but it neither interferes with the affairs of the council nor appoints the chairman which is what practitioners are afraid of. You mention unionism and they say they don’t want the government to over-control them.

The broadcasters meet every time to review the broadcasting code. If we have such a structure in film, my job will be easier.

We have gone past the era of censorship. We are now in the era of classification which is about rating. If a film gets a restricted rating, then it must be one that could cause social harm. What filmmaker wants to spend N50 million on a project and get a restriction? No one. So they will try to create within the ambits of the law so they can get the appropriate rating for their film.

Regarding restrictions, NFVCB appeared to have banned the overt display of alcohol or nicotine products, elements of LGBTQ advocacy, and nudity in films. Was this a coordinated policy rollout backed by legislation or just an advisory?

Let me just correct that. We didn’t ban. We never even used the word. There is a regulation we met on the ground. Nigeria has a National Tobacco Control Act passed in 2015 and reviewed up till 2019. That code has provisions for different agencies to take up their responsibility to control the glamorisation and promotion of tobacco. Even the act does not ban smoking. The act only says that there should be no more advert for tobacco in our media.

The responsibility to enforce it is with APCON. The act says you can’t smoke in public. There must be a restricted place where you smoke. An agency like the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria obeys this. It’s why you can’t smoke even in the toilet of an aeroplane. Different sectors have been mandated to implement this act.

So have we. It says we need to control the glamorisation and promotion of tobacco and narcotics. Because tobacco has been banned on billboards, the next place would likely be to use our films and video works to promote.

If you need to use tobacco in film as a necessary scene for educational purposes or historical accuracy, you are free. But you must warn at the beginning of the film that the producers and actors do not endorse smoking. You must also indicate that smoking is injurious to health.

This is a global convention. But the moment mentioned it, they started calling it a ban. It is not a ban.

Even animal rights activists have succeded in pushing that a similar warning must be given for the use of animals in a film to clarify that no animal was harmed.

It’s the same thing for depicting smoking. We know the necessary scenes where smoking must be used. Not the type that will show a depressed young lady smoking seven sticks, having two packs of the cigarette visible on the table, and then flaunting the brand before the camera. That’s overt promotion. That’s what we’re against. For goodness sake, how can I ban smoking in film? Even the World Health Organisation is still struggling with it. I’m a theatre art practitioner. We smoke in films when necessary. But some filmmakers ink sponsorship deals with tobacco companies and needlessly glamorise smoking in every scene. That’s no longer for historical accuracy.

The same thing goes for the depiction of ritual killing in films. We’re not saying we’re not a ritualistic society. But you can’t be telling our young that decapitating a human makes it rain dollars. The more disturbing thing is how it is sometimes so graphically done. And many times, the consequences of these ritual crimes in the film aren’t befitting of the portrayed consequences.

Stephen Kenechi: This adapted regulation you speak of, what’s it named and when is it out?

Shaibu Husseini: It’s with the ministry of justice. It is the NFVCB 2024 Regulation on the Control of the Promotion/Glamorisation of Tobacco, Narcotics, Ritual Killings, and Money Rituals. They need to gazette it for it to be law.

That’s why we’re not enforcing any of those things presently, even though we’ve been carrying out sensitisation.

A lot of our filmmakers do not know that there’s a National Tobacco Control Act in place. We just took our part in our practice for film and video works.

The most important thing is that you give adequate warning if you want to do a scene that potentially promotes smoking. Evening broadcasters now are warning about flash photography for those who have vision issues.

Stephen Kenechi: Nigeria has gone past the traditional methods of film release and distribution to embrace OTT Video. In 2023, the NFVCB was going to re-enact its law to regulate streaming platforms. How is this coming along?

Shaibu Husseini: It’s still at the national assembly. It has gone past the first and second reading to almost the final stage. The lawmaker promoting the bill didn’t come back to the current assembly, so we had to get another person to push it.

In that bill, we are looking to amend some of the things that limit us as an agency. The bill takes care of OTT Video.

We’ve truly gone past the traditional cinema and DVD distribution. We are waiting for the bill to be enacted so we can fully accommodate digital streaming but we have been engaging with the streaming platforms.

About 95 percent of them have been cooperating with us on the need for filmmakers to classify their films and video works. We are working on a protocol that mandates filmmakers to have a classification certificate to be able to submit their content to streamers.

Even though the current law does not specify digital streaming, it says every film and video work produced or imported to be exhibited in the country must be classified. In the bill, there is no more censorship. We’re now a classification organisation. Video works, including dramatised short content which is what we call skits, must come to us first.

Stephen Kenechi: And YouTube?

Shaibu Husseini: I don’t want to be specific about individual platforms but we are in talks with them. YouTube has opened up and created employment. But they need to do that within the law. In other societies, classification organisations restrict or remove content from any of these platforms that don’t abide by the law. But I don’t want to go into that regime now. We’re setting up a protocol where unclassified films will not be allowed to premiere. We have achieved a 95 percent success rate. What is holding us back is that we are building an infrastructure that will enable filmmakers to submit films virtually and get their certificates in record time. It should be ready on October 1. We will go full-blast on enforcement by January 1, 2025.

Filmmakers will no longer have to physically visit our office to classify their films. If you submit a music video at 09:00, you should get your certificate by 9:30 or 10:00 on the same day. Feature films won’t take more than 48 hours to certify. It’s a deck. It operates like a site. You can track the classification process in real-time. If there are issues, a report will be sent to you and you will respond before an e-certificate is issued.

When we had the issue of films portraying same-sex relationships, we called the platforms and they dropped it. I had a meeting with all these platforms when I assumed office. I told them that what they describe as community standards might not be the same for us. Here we do 18 as the age for adults, but they do 16 or 14. That doesn’t work for us. Short content creators use local lingo to pass certain inappropriate messages. The platforms don’t understand them, so they pass it. But we understand, so we will have them rely on us.

Stephen Kenechi: How about films being aired on TV?

Shaibu Husseini: Sometimes we have one or two sharp practices among filmmakers airing on TV. We have a monitoring department. Not too long ago, a producer added elements to their films post-classification. We detected it and had it brought down. They pay a fine or we blacklist them.

As for TV programmes, those are left for the NBC.

Stephen Kenechi: In the UK, US, and Canada, film-TV industry regulation takes the form of rating compliance, promoting educative local content with a system of quotas, and generally ensuring ethical advertising. Is the NFVCB looking to get involved in the film space to stimulate competition and self-regulation as a result?

Shaibu Husseini: I must point out again that self-regulation does not stop us from having the NFVCB because there’s a limit to what self-relegation can achieve. With the structure we are pushing for, we can make complaints at the council. This will prevent acrimony from any party on both sides. It will be such that both the regulator and filmmakers are more of partners. The NFVCB will hold workshops and take advantage of collaborating with organisations to give back to the industry. We’re planning a programme to see how we can support those who make films about Nigeria’s culture. But we’re not a production company. We don’t make films. We will support filmmakers at the level of script development which we know is missing in the industry. We are also working to finalise the process of supporting films that are doing well internationally. Say two of our films were chosen to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). That’s big for us.

Stephen Kenechi: How would you respond to calls to scrap the NFVCB in cutting down governance costs and implementing the Orosanye Report?

Shaibu Husseini: I won’t be able to comment in detail on this because I’m right in the middle of it. Talking about it now would seem as though I’m trying to keep a job for myself. But, to be honest, no country in the world doesn’t need a film classification board, especially in the digital era.

They have their argument. So anytime the government makes a decision, it’s usually in the best interest. But do you think Canada, South Africa, and Britain will say they don’t need a classification board because they’re liberal? The only country I know that doesn’t have a government-run classification board is maybe the US. And the industry has a regulatory mechanism that is respected. In Africa, Kenya has. Even Gambia wrote to us that they want to come and understand our model. You need a censorship board, especially in this age.