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Nigeria: The War Against Film-Making
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Leadership (Abuja)
2 April 2008
Posted to the web 2 April 2008
Nasir S. Gwangwazo
Abuja
The sour relationship between Hausa movie practitioners and the Kano State government has worsened with the raid by the state's Hisbah Board's men on a popular actress's house.
Is the Kano State government waging a war of attrition against Hausa film-makers in the state or merely carrying out measures to sanitise the movie trade in order to make it fit in with the people's religious and cultural values? The answer is hard to find in northern Nigeria's most populous city. In any case, the precariously worsening relationship between the film-makers and some government agencies escalated recently when the Kano State Hisbah Board (KSHB), a government outfit set up with a mandate to safeguard morality, raided a house where some girls linked to the film industry lived. This culminated in the Motion Picture Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MOPPAN) accusing the board of human right violation. The accusation arose after truckloads of the board's "Islamic police" had stormed the house of a popular actress, Zainab Umar (a.k.a. Raga), forcefully took her and her friend away and detained them for more than 20 hours in the Hisbah headquarters. Zainab, who hails from Jaji, near Kaduna, and Zahra'u were at home in the Ja'en area of Sharada quarters in the metropolis in the night of Saturday, March 22, 2008, when the Hisbah corps arrived in several trucks.
"The Hisba men just entered the house and took the girls away to their head office where they locked them up," an eyewitness who lived in the neighbourhood told LEADERSHIP last Saturday.
"They were forced to share a cell with many men till the afternoon of the following day. It took the intervention of Kannywood officials like Ahmad Alkanawy before they were released on bail."
The witness said that while in detention, the girls were called names by men of the Hisbah Board such as "prostitutes," "lay-abouts" and "useless."
They were denied food or drink throughout the period of their detention, he said.
"The funny thing is that after they were released, one of the men kept phoning Zainab, telling her that he was interested in dating her," he added.
The girls were accused by the Hisbah Board of living a single life on their own. Both have gone into hiding after their bail. Zainab was said to have escaped to Kaduna while Zahra'u has relocated to the Goron Dutse area in Kano.
Official measures against movie practitioners have become rampant since last year when a sex clip involving a well known actress, Maryam Hiyana, which was made by her boyfriend using a cellphone camera, emerged. The state government began to take stringent measures to make the practitioners fall into line.
A no-nonesense mullah, who was appointed as head of the state Film Censorship Board, unleashed measures viewed largely by practitioners as draconian. The man, Malam Abubakar Rabo Abdulkareem, was a former head of the Hisbah Board. He was promoted from executive secretary to director-general by Governor Ibrahim Shekarau, apparently for a job well done.
He has so far unfolded a number of measures that have restricted the film trade. Film-making was banned for six months until last month, forcing thousands of film practitioners into the labour market and making actors to emigrate en masse – an outcome some viewed as the original plan for imposing the hitherto moribund state censorship laws that the government approved in 2001.
A popular actor, Adam A. Zango, was jailed for releasing an uncensored hip-hop song video. After months of incarceration, he escaped to Kaduna with his wife, son and aged mother. Earlier, the chairman of the Kano State Guild of Film Artistes, Sani Musa Danja, had relocated to Abuja with his wife, the popular actress Mansura Isah, after some men had forced their way into his house reportedly in order to kill him.
The award-winning actor Ali Nuhu last week revealed plans to migrate to Kaduna. Three major movie distributors were sent to gaol for allowing an "unapproved" trailer to appear in a movie. A fortnight ago six girls were fined N40,000 each by the censors board's mobile court for acting in an open air theatre. National president of MOPPAN, Sani Mu'azu, has had his new movie, 'Hafsah,' banned by the Censors Board from circulating in Kano recently for not registering with the censors. He has sued the board in a Kano High Court for "contravening its own laws." The case is pending in court.
The 'war' against Hausa film industry, known as Kannywood, has just entered a new phase with pamphleteering being employed as a weapon. On March 21, a letter from a faceless "Islamic Forum" was circulated in mosques all over the city, accusing the film-makers of cavorting with "Jews and NGOs" in order to undermine Islam. This was a sentiment that could echo nicely in the hearts of many a commoner. Film practitioners told LEADERSHIP that they suspected a government agency of instigating the letter.
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"These incidences are not unconnected," said the Artistes Guild in a written complaint.
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