Africa

African filmmakers brace for a tough 2024 despite streaming wins

THE NEWS

NAIROBI — African film and TV producers are bracing themselves for tough times and leaner production budgets in 2024, despite the industry’s continued growth.

Success in 2023 was driven by several major releases of African titles as streaming companies including Netflix and Showmax bet on their African slates to drive growth on the continent. Shows like South Africa’s Unseen and Shanty Town were some of the most viewed and attracted global attention, as did the Nigerian action thriller The Black Book which spent three weeks among Netflix’s top 10 English-language titles in the world.

But multiple producers and executives in countries including Nigeria and Kenya, who spoke to Semafor Africa, said African producers in 2023 had to adapt to tighter production budgets driven by harsh macroeconomic conditions, and they expect more of the same in 2024.

“People were faced with difficulty but they pushed past it,” said Enyi Omeruah, co-founder of Lagos-based production and talent management firm Chudor MMC. “It’s what we have done since before the world was paying attention.” Omeruah said that the weight of economic pressures including a weakening naira and rising fuel prices heavily constrained production budgets in Nigeria.

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To grow their market share in Africa, streaming services including Netflix and MultiChoice-owned Showmax have, in recent years, invested heavily in producing or acquiring local content in key markets including Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Netflix says it invested $175 million in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya between 2016 and 2022.

South Africa accounted for eight out of the top 10 most watched African titles on Netflix in the first half of 2023, according to Netflix’s first-ever engagement report, with the other two from Nigeria. The data, however, doesn’t account for African titles released after June 2023 including films such as The Black Book, which was released in September.

The data seems to align with research which shows that South Africa accounts for 73.3% of Netflix subscriptions in Africa, followed by Nigeria with 10.5% and Kenya with 3.9%.

Lapalala Wilderness School, a four-decade old conservation education program on a reserve in South Africa, won a “highly commended” award for its new education center at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore earlier this month.

The building, which opened in November 2022 in the northern province of Limpopo, was designed by Johannesburg-based Local Studio. The builders used rammed earth, rock, and hardwood combined with concrete and masonry base structures. The project has been designated as net-zero rated, since it runs off a solar plant, and recycles its water.

The Lapalala Wilderness Reserve covers around 185 square miles of land, featuring the winding Palala River and mountainous grounds, which were designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2001. The area is home to black and white rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, cheetah, and sable antelope, among hundreds of other species. Since 1985, over 100,000 school age children have traveled there from across the country for week-long educational programs focused on biodiversity and wildlife conservation.

Nigerian football club Sporting Lagos will enroll three of its players at Miva Open University, an online school in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, to facilitate “personal and professional growth” while building their careers on the field.

Sporting Lagos was founded by Shola Akinlade, the co-founder of payments company Paystack. It won promotion to the top division of Nigeria’s football pyramid in July, less than 18 months after its launch. Miva is the creation of Sim Shagaya, best known in African tech for founding e-commerce company Konga, and education tech startup uLesson.

Enrolling active young footballers in a university is a different approach from what is usually the case in the sport globally. The majority of footballers who pursue higher learning wait until after retirement. Sporting Lagos’ initiative seems aimed at nudging players towards an early balance. “I wouldn’t say there is a specific on-field performance advantage we’re looking at here,” David Odunlami, Sporting Lagos’s brand storytelling lead, told Semafor Africa. “Football in Nigeria is pretty interesting — people go through so much to reach a professional level, and many times, this involves missing out on crucial things like education.”

The club made the opportunity open to every member of its playing squad but will select interested players with the right basic qualifications for the course they want to pursue according to Nigeria’s university enrollment guidelines, Odunlami said.

“There will be three players going in for the programs. We’re not fully finalized on the specific courses they want to study, but we’ll announce that as soon as we know,” Odunlami said. Miva, which offers bachelor’s degrees in nine disciplines from computer science to nursing, will cover tuition for the players, he said.

About 18 months ago Semafor’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith and I were walking through New York’s world-famous Times Square, deep in discussion about what Semafor could be, when we stumbled upon a restaurant called Lagos. We took a quick look inside and learned it was indeed a Nigerian restaurant and we promised to be back. We finally did that this week and really enjoyed the food.

While all the food was great, I was really struck by our starter: asun, which is roasted goat meat heavily spiced up with hot peppers and salt. When I was young, asun was associated with an area in Yorubaland, in southwest Nigeria. Specifically, the dish had ties to the region around Ondo where my father was born, about 250 kilometers to the east of Lagos.

When I was growing up the only place I ever saw asun was at our family gatherings when the entire delicacy was made from scratch and involved lots of loud raucous debates between grown men over who was supposed to get the best part of the goat.

Now, of course, asun is widely available across Lagos and in many places, like London, where there are large Nigerian communities — and in New York’s Lagos restaurant where Ben and I ate.

It was a reminder for me that through rapid urbanization, migration, entrepreneurship, and even technology (there are dozens of videos online showing ‘how to make asun’), African food is traveling around the world and evolving as it does so.

— Yinka

🇰🇪 Kenya marked its 60th Independence Day on Dec. 12, which offered a moment to reflect on the social, political and economic milestones. Rasna Warah in her essay avers that Kenya is not yet free but a colony of neoliberal institutions including the International Monetary Fund, which dictates the country’s economic policy. “The cost of living is unbearable, punitive new taxes are killing the economy and impoverishing millions, the leadership is arrogant and insensitive to ordinary people’s plight, and the looting of public funds continues unabated,” she writes. She concludes that Kenya has since colonialism remained a predatory state that only benefits a small elite.

🇲🇱 Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem’s debut novel “Bound to Violence” was reissued by the Penguin Classics in March, more than 50 years after the author was accused of plagiarism. Ouologuem’s book, published in 1968 in Paris, is a satirical work parodying his culture through exploring an imaginary African empire. It won the prestigious Prix Renaudot award and earned him worldwide recognition. However, he would be accused of plagiarizing English Writer Graham Greene’s 1934 novel, “It’s a Battlefield.” The allegations pushed Ouologuem off the literary stage until his death in 2017 in his home country in Mali.

🌍 Increased military takeovers through coups in African countries point to greater local sociopolitical and economic challenges, but also the failure of elected leaders to uphold democratic ideals and deliver on the promise of serving their citizens, Comfort Ero and Murithi Nutiga write in Foreign Affairs. They note that local dynamics led to the recent toppling of leaders in countries including Gabon, Mali, Niger, and Guinea, even though coups tend to reverse economic and political progress. Hence, to stem the rise of coups and help uphold democracy, organizations like the African Union, Ecowas, and European actors should recognize the deeper context in which they are emerging.

🗓️ Uganda’s constitutional court will hear a case which challenges the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act. The law punishes a range of same-sex offenses with lengthy sentences and death for so-called aggravated homosexuality. Petitioners want the controversial law to be declared unconstitutional and annulled. (Dec. 18)

🗓️ The African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation and the Rwanda government will sign the host country agreement for the Foundation in Kigali on Monday. (Dec. 18)

🗓️ The International Monetary Fund’s executive board is scheduled to meet for the second review of Zambia’s extended credit facility programme. (Dec. 20)

🗓️ Over 40 million Congolese voters will go to the polls for the next presidential election on Wednesday. President Félix Tshisekedi — who will be seeking re-election for a second, and final, five-year term — will face off against Martin Fayulu who came second in 2018 presidential elections, businessman Moïse Katumbi, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr Denis Mukwege. (Dec. 20).

• COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber has achieved something unprecedented for an oil executive: Winning fans among climate activists.
• While playing an instrumental role in hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas, Qatar has also quietly emerged as a key intermediary in the case of an American detained by the Taliban.
• Semafor Tech showed up at the hottest annual machine learning conference in New Orleans this week to find that Chinese tech companies and Wall Street trading firms were among the most prominent participants.

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— Yinka, Alexis Akwagyiram, Alexander Onukwue, Martin Siele, and Muchira Gachenge