🧚🏿‍♀️earth2pike🫧

During this weekend, we have been hearing that Nollywood is an 8.2 billion dollar industry and that we contribute 850 plus billion naira to the economy. Where are these figures from? Why are they being repeated? I went digging. The N853.9 billion figure comes from Nigeria's 2014 GDP rebasing. That was the first time the statistics bureau counted Nollywood in GDP. It's 2013 data, over a decade old. At the time, the naira was about N157 to the dollar, which made it about $5.1 billion. In 2016, an IMF magazine article repeated the same N853.9 billion but called it $7.2 billion. Same naira, different dollars. It was a feature article, not an IMF study, but "IMF says" stuck, and we have been quoting it ever since. At today's exchange rate, that same N853.9 billion is worth under $600 million. What about $6.4 billion and $8.2 billion? I couldn't find a published method for either. The $6.4 billion traces back to a speech at a summit. The $8.2 billion looks like the same thing, pushed a little higher. Even the original number needs context: It wasn't only film. The category was motion pictures, sound recording and music production. Music was inside it. It was estimated, not counted. Roughly, number of films produced multiplied by assumed revenue per film. A huge part of it was informal and pirated trade. One report at the time said less than 1% of the industry's value was tracked from official ticket sales and royalties. Now let's do our own maths. Cinema did about N15.6 billion last year. That's roughly $10 million. Add streaming licences, pay-TV, YouTube and free-to-air TV, and the formal, countable revenue of this industry is in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. Nowhere near $8 billion. Also, "contribution to GDP," "market size" and "valuation" are three different things. GDP contribution is yearly activity. Market size is how much people spend. Valuation is what an asset is worth based on future profit. We keep mixing them up on stages and in pitch decks. Why does this matter? Because when we inflate our numbers, we make bad decisions. Investors who do their homework stop trusting us. Government thinks we're thriving and doesn't act. And we keep planning for an industry that doesn't exist, while filmmakers make 4 million in 7 weeks. We can't fix what we won't measure honestly. Let's start telling ourselves the truth about the numbers. That's where the real conversation begins.