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From Fred Itua, Abuja
While Wall Street pours billions into music catalogues and film rights, Nigeria’s creative economy remains locked out of the very financial system that should be powering it. That is the stark message from Idris-Etanami Usman, Group Chief Executive Officer of FOAN Group, one of Africa’s most prominent media chiefs.
Usman has issued a forceful challenge to Nigerian banks, regulators and policymakers to stop treating creative work as cultural decoration and start recognising it for what it has become everywhere else in the world; a serious, bankable asset class.
His intervention comes against the backdrop of a global content gold rush that Nigeria is watching from the sidelines. Sony paid the equivalence of over £1 billion for Queen’s music catalogue in 2024, the biggest music deal in recorded history.
American firm Concord raised the equivalent of £1.4 billion from Wall Street investors using songs by The Beatles, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and The Rolling Stones as collateral, bonds that were rated A-plus and three times oversubscribed.
In Hollywood, DreamWorks Animation borrowed the equivalent of 240 million pounds against its film library alone.
In Nigeria, despite years of government speeches about the creative economy being the next oil, most creators still cannot borrow a single kobo against their copyright, music rights or film library.
“Nigeria cannot continue to speak about a thriving creative economy while the financial architecture required to power that economy remains weak,” Usman said. “If banks do not see content as business, the whole thing is just talk.”
Nollywood is already the second biggest film industry in the world by output. Afrobeats has conquered global charts. Yet the wealth generated by African talent continues to be captured abroad, because the structures to monetise it at home simply do not exist.
Usman has proposed a five-point remedy drawn from established international practice: stronger copyright enforcement, credible valuation systems, trusted rights registration, insurance products that protect lenders, and specialist film and music finance desks within Nigerian banks, of the kind that have operated for decades in London and Los Angeles.
“If banks, asset managers and development finance institutions do not act,” he warned, “all the language about boosting the content economy will amount to little more than lip service.”
For a country that gave the world Fela Kuti, Burna Boy, Tems and Nollywood, it is a warning that deserves urgent attention.
