IT was the reggae legend Bob Marley who once sang: “Old pirates, yes, they rob I,” a song that fits into the crime of intellectual property piracy. In the realm of creativity, piracy looms as a cancer robbing artists, writers and musicians of their rightful rewards. Nowhere is this more evident than in Nigeria, where piracy has become an epidemic.
Imagine dedicating years of blood, sweat, and tears to crafting a masterpiece, only to see it replicated and sold cheaply on street corners without author’s consent. The joy of creation is replaced by a bitter taste of injustice. This is the reality faced by countless Nigerian artists, who find their work pirated and sold at a fraction of its true value. The pirates, emboldened by the lack of enforcement, laugh all the way to the bank, while the creators are left to grapple with the financial and emotional toll. In stark contrast, advanced countries have taken a firm stance against piracy. Intellectual property laws are strictly enforced, and penalties for infringement are severe.
In the new biography, Who Dares Wins written by Dotun Adekanmbi, Akogun ’Lanre Adesuyi, an entrepreneur extraordinaire and owner of the Havilah Group of companies shares the horrifying story of his direct encounter with pirates boldly selling on the streets of Lagos pirated copies of a book his company Havilah Books had won the right to import and market in Nigeria. The book is There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, the bestselling memoir of the famous writer, Chinua Achebe. This is how the story is captured in Akogun Adesuyi’s biography:
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In 2012, the famous Nigerian author, Prof. Chinua Achebe, released his highly popular, though equally highly controversial work, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, which was first published in the UK by Allen Lane. Havilah won the right to import and market the book in Nigeria. The first 50,000 copies that were ordered sold out immediately, thus necessitating placing a second order. Before payment was made for the second batch, a local bookseller called Adesuyi who was in Abuja on business. His grouse was that Havilah had not fulfilled his order. He advised Adesuyi to handle the marketing of the book with utmost care because its growing popularity could encourage pirates to target it. Adesuyi thanked him for the well-meaning counsel.
About a week later, he returned to Lagos. He could not believe his eyes when a street trader waved copies of There Was A Country in his face while he was stuck in the traffic in Maryland, Lagos! He called the hawker who promptly ran to him, hoping to make a good on-the-run sale to a ‘Big Man’ in a big car. Adesuyi collected all the copies the hawker and asked if he had more. Naturally, he did and even collected more from his fellow hawkers while Adesuyi told his driver to park at a convenient spot not far from the traffic light where policemen and traffic controllers stood. While he pretended to make payment for the purchases, he bantered with the hawker but essentially asked for the source of his supply, which the hawker happily volunteered. The hawker was shocked, and bystanders were astounded when Adesuyi in a fit of anger tore every copy of the book to shreds without paying! In part, his rage was because the source of piracy was traced to the bookseller who had called him a week earlier! Adesuyi never called the man. Instead, he told people who were close to the bookseller and the message in a roundabout way got to the culprit. Havilah promptly cancelled its 50,000-copy second order for the book to cut its losses. Till date, Adesuyi remembers the incident with utter disgust.
“At the time, it did not occur to me that the hawker could have arranged with his colleagues to fight me on the streets of Maryland. I think I was lucky my action caught him by surprise, and he was so deeply frightened that he ran away before I drove off. I could have taken the matter further but to fight pirates then was almost impossible. Today, however, the Nigerian Copyright Commission under the leadership of its Director-General, Dr. John Asein, is doing a very good job waging war against piracy in Nigeria.”
While the Copyright Act 2022 may have been useful in the campaign against piracy, it has not helped significantly in winning the war. First, because the wheel of justice is agonizingly slow that pirates feel no hurt despite some landmark judgments to make piracy less attractive. The burden of proof is also tasking, as the right party would have to justify its claim to the copyright and intellectual control of the property. Whatever money was invested could be lost to the government by the way of confiscation in the event of failure to establish the legal grounds for complaints. More troubling is that the punishment for piracy is often a slap on the wrist. In the case of a convicted individual, penalty is “a fine of at least N100,000 or imprisonment for a term of at least one year or both” while for a body corporate the fine is to the tune of “at least N2,000,000.”
Adesuyi pinpoints several challenges that beset the publishing industry in contemporary times. One of these is the low purchasing power of customers owing to several dislocations in the national economy. This factor, he opines, has inadvertently fuelled the menace of piracy, as parents who are desirous of giving good education to their children are often constrained by the increasingly prohibitive cost of original works. Hence, their recourse to patronizing cheaper, low quality pirated versions.
Olaniran and Adesuyi are aligned in their identification of some more challenges to publishing in Nigeria. For both, sourcing authoritative authors is a major problem. According to Olaniran, “The authors we knew in the development of publishing were foreigners like the Larcombes of this world. Later, when attempts were made to indigenize writing, Nigerian authors were introduced to provide the local flavour with which learners could easily identify. While Nigerian authors were introduced into publishing with a mandate to express themselves, the question arose: ‘What is the benefit to me when I write?’ This is talking of ‘royalty’, which is a ratio of a percentage that goes to the author of a work. Along the publishing growth path, the confidentiality between authors and publishers began to suffer.”
Adesuyi is no less persuaded: “When we receive library stocking lists from university librarians, we noticed that a significant percentage of the books were by foreign authors. In effect, we import a higher percentage of books when weighed against locally researched and published academic books. The problem may not be that of publishers but of the academicians themselves because they are probably not conducting enough research since funding is scarce for such endeavours in Nigeria.”
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