Afia TV, the first eastern Nigeria-based broadcast media company to go live on DSTV, lost its YouTube account recently over proclaimed community standards.
The CEO of Afia TV, Mr Emeka Mba, announced the development on LinkedIn, stressing the danger of Nigeria’s creative industry over-reliance on foreign platforms and the need to build homegrown digital distribution platforms. He lamented the development and the condescending interaction between Afia TV and YouTube days after the channel was shut down.
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. Mba Said
The mediapreneur highlighted the risk of over-reliance by Nigeria’s multi-billion naira creative industry on Foreign platforms like Facebook or YouTube. He stated that these platforms don’t serve the interests of Nigerian creators but are mostly driven by corporate interest and geopolitical priorities.
MBA reminded his audience that the call for indigenous platforms is an old one and long overdue, giving various instances of takedowns and loss of Nigerian YouTube accounts that grew organically painstakingly.
The Long-Term Approach
The Afia TV CEO reiterated that the major challenge on a long-term basis for Nigeria’s creative industry isn’t a lack of talent but distribution. He reminisced back in the late 90s, before the advent of the internet in Nigeria, about how the main challenge was the lack of Cinema Chains, another distribution gap.
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The same challenge holds sway today with the lack of control over existing distribution platforms because they are mostly foreign-owned and serving corporate interests. Mba charged Nigerians to utilize their enormous human capital and idea bank to seize control of the entire creative chain and steer it away from the grasp of Global platforms with different agendas.
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. He said.
