By Emeka Mba
LAST week, my team and I woke up to discover we had been locked out of our @afiatvofficial YouTube account—without warning. After a couple of emails, we finally received a terse email citing “community standards” violations, with no explanation of what the violation actually was. After building our channel organically over years, investing resources to grow an audience, our entire page was simply…gone.
I share this not to seek sympathy, but to highlight a structural problem that the Nigerian creative sector faces, something which I have warned about for years, which is the need for home grown physical and even more important now, digital distribution platforms.
An Old Warning: Almost two years ago at the NIFT conference organized by Ijeoma Onah, during a session I was part of, I cautioned that while our content space was booming—while creators were making real money on YouTube—we were dangerously dependent on international platforms. These platforms have total control over access, policy, visibility, and monetization. They can take you down without notice, lock you out without explanation, or change their revenue rules overnight.
We’ve seen it happen: Yet many in the industry have been reluctant to grapple with this. As my friend Kunle Afolayan rightly notes, YouTube is a huge part of Nollywood’s future. But can it be a sustainable or future dependent on external platforms? There is no doubt that the presence of Youtube and other online platforms have formed a significant source of distribution and revenue for many creators across Nigeria and Africa, for whithout them, many content creators we know today, may not have had the opportunity to make it, for that we are grateful.
The Risks of Reliance: However, reliance on global platforms that we don’t control is risky for any country’s creative economy. These platforms don’t exist to serve Nigerian interests. They serve their own corporate goals, legal regimes, and even geopolitical priorities that have nothing to do with us.
Consider last year’s reports that Netflix and Amazon were reevaluating their local investments after spending huge amounts on Nigerian originals. Many of our filmmakers had become reliant on them for funding. Their sudden retreat left gaps in financing and distribution. If they can come and go at will, where does that leave our industry?
A Strategic Imperative: As someone who’s worked both as a media owner and a former regulator, I believe this is one of the most important strategic questions for Nigeria’s creative sector today.
We need to be clear-eyed:
This is not just about protecting revenue. It’s about cultural sovereignty, creative freedom, and economic security.
Building for the Long Term: Since the late 90s I’ve argued that the biggest barrier to a sustainable creative industry isn’t talent. It’s distribution. First it was the lack of cinema chains. Now it’s the lack of local streaming platforms.
Without control over distribution, our creators will always be vulnerable. They will always be price-takers. This is the time for serious investment in Nigerian-owned platforms that understand our market, our languages, our tastes, our nuances. Platforms that can negotiate with the world from a position of strength, not dependency.
A Call to Action: The world has changed. Technology can and should serve our national interests, not undermine them. We have the talent. We have the audience. We even have the resources and the technology is available. What we need is the strategic vision and investment to build platforms that work for us. As i write this article, i saw that MTN has just announced the launch of the largest data center in West Africa, this is great news, and will certainly be beneficial in building our home grown digital content distribution platforms.