Let me tell you a story about a country that is not Nigeria.
In 1986, a film opened in American cinemas about a hot-headed fighter pilot. It was called Top Gun. It was, by most honest accounts, a flashy, two-hour advertisement of the American navy aviators. And after it played, the United States Navy reported that applications to fly jumped by as much as five hundred per cent. Navy recruiters set up folding tables right there in the cinema lobbies, because the young men walked out of the cinema wanting to be the person they had just watched on the screen.
Philip Strub, the man who ran the Pentagon’s entertainment office for nearly thirty years once admitted that the American military, could never have been able to pay for the level of exposure.
Think about that. The most powerful military on earth, with the largest “budget in human history, confessing that its most effective recruiter was not a weapon, not a general, not a budget line. It was a story. It was culture. It was a young man with good teeth and a leather jacket, and a nation confident enough to let its artists sell it to the world.
Now here is my question for this room. If a film can build the image of an army – what can our films, our music, our fashion, our comedy, our animation, build for a nation of two hundred and thirty million people who are already, whether we admit it or not, the storytellers of a continent?
THE PERSONAL TURN -OUR OWN UNTOLD STORY
But before we speak of what our stories can build, let me tell you what their absence has cost -because for me, this is not theory. It is personal.
I had my secondary school education at the Air Force Military School, Jos, so I have many friends, course mates, juniors and seniors that have fought and some still currently fighting the battle against insurgency, I lost one of them, my godfather from school, to an IED blast in 2014. He wore the uniform of the Nigerian Army, and he went to the north-east to stand between the insurgency and the rest of us. He did not come home.
I remember his wife’s pain. I remember his children’s pain. I remember a country’s quiet loss. But what stays with me most is this: his story has never been told. And he is one of thousands – men and women who have fought, and who are fighting for this country as I stand here speaking to you.
Think of the mornings in this very room. Most of us here kiss someone goodbye before a trip to Abuja, to Kano, to Enugu, perhaps to London -and then we go back to bed. But who tells the story of the wife who kisses her husband goodbye into the Sambisa forest, not knowing whether that is the last time she will ever see that face? Who tells the story of the child born while his father slept in a trench, in the rain, a thousand miles from that delivery room?
America turned its soldiers into legends the whole world would recognise. We have not yet told the stories of ours – not even to our own children. That is what a story left untold costs a nation. And it is exactly what the power of art and storytelling has the power to reshape.
THE EVIDENCE – WHAT WE ALREADY ARE
But I have hope, because we are not starting from zero. We are starting from a giant that does not yet know its own size.
Nollywood is, by volume, the second-largest film industry on the planet. It has created an estimated one million jobs, which makes it the second-largest employer in this country after agriculture -and it did that, for years, with almost no help from any of us. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, the National Bureau of Statistics put the output of our arts, entertainment and motion picture sector at ₦728.8 billion -a sector that has grown more than one hundred and fifty per cent over the last decade. When Netflix quietly invested about twenty-three million dollars here, it supported over five thousand jobs and licensed more than two hundred and fifty of our films.
That is what our creative economy does while it is still, in policy terms, largely an orphan.
And, from statistics, our entire creative economy contributed roughly 1.2 per cent of our GDP -the lowest of any benchmark African economy we can be proud to be compared itself to.
COMPARISON I – THE NEIGHBOUR WHO ORGANISED
Look just south of us. South Africa is a smaller country, with fewer people and, frankly, without our raw cultural firepower -nobody is streaming Johannesburg the way the world streams Lagos. And yet their cultural and creative industries contribute close to three per cent of their GDP -about two hundred and seventy-one billion rand -and support roughly 1.4 million jobs. In their economy, their creative sector is now about the same size as agriculture.
The difference between us and them is not talent. On talent, it is not close. The difference is that they counted it, they structured it, and they financed it. We have the louder voice. They built the better microphone, provided better infrastructure, and supported with better policies.
COMPARISON II -THE COUNTRY THAT CHOSE THIS ON PURPOSE
Now let’s look further, to a country that made a decision. Forty years ago, South Korea was known for one thing: factories. Ships and semiconductors. Then it chose -deliberately, as national strategy -to export its culture.
The results are almost difficult to say out loud. In one year, Korea’s culture-related exports were worth around fourteen billion dollars. A single Netflix series, Squid Game, added over nine hundred million dollars in value the moment it aired. And here is the comparison I want you to carry home with you today -my one global example. Consider a single company. Not a factory. Not an oil major. A Korean band called BTS, is estimated to add close to five billion dollars to the Korean economy every single year -a contribution that economists have compared to the annual exports of Hyundai, their national carmaker.
Seven young men. Singing. Worth a car company.
Tell me we do not have seven young men and women in Lagos, in Enugu, in Kano, in Benin City, who could do the same -if we financed them like an industry instead of admiring them like a hobby, and we provided the platforms, the infrastructure, both physical and virtual, and the policies that support them and keep them here.
THE PROBLEM -NAMED PLAINLY
So let us name the gaps honestly, because you cannot fix what you are too polite to say.
First, skills. We have raw talent in abundance and trained, employable talent in shortage. The employability surveys tell us the gaps are exactly where the money is -cinematography, production management, animation, the craft behind the camera.
Second, capital. The average Nollywood film has historically been made on a budget a fraction of what a single day costs a serious studio abroad. A great script in this country dies not because it is bad, but because it is broke.
Third, structure. No intellectual property protection worth the name. No formal pathway from a bedroom idea to a bankable enterprise. Genius, in Nigeria, has always been forced to freelance, and when you freelance, to finance structures to get paid, keep your money in, keep your data in.
THE SOLUTION -HOW IDICE IS BUILT
Now -we tried to look at some of these issues when we designed the iDICE programme. While the programme is not the solution to all the problems, we tried to identify some of the critical issues and try to at least begin to solve them.
iDICE -the Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises programme – is a commitment by the Federal Government of Nigeria, financed alongside the African Development Bank, the Agence Française de Développement, and the Islamic Development Bank. Today, I want you to remember the design of iDICE, because the design provides some answers to the three problems I just named.
iDICE wasn’t designed as a pipeline, or a handout – but a journey a young Nigerian can walk from talent to enterprise.
It begins with skills. We will be training thousands of young people – in specific, bankable crafts. Not certificates for the shelf. Skills for the set, the studio, and the startup.
Then it moves to capital. And this is where the Federal Government, under the oversight of the Vice President and through BOI’s iDICE programme is doing something Nigeria has rarely done for its creators – building them a real financial staircase. A DICE Fund for equity, so a serious creative enterprise can take on an investor instead of a lender. We appointed Kuramo Capital as our Fund-of-Funds Manager to bring in professional money at scale, this means if you are a creator with a fund, you can approach the fund-of-funds and be funded. We are also in the final stages of onboarding a creative fund manager, the fund manager would invest directly in creative sector businesses. Beside it, a debt window -including a Shari’ah-compliant, non-interest facility -because a young creator’s faith should never be the reason they cannot get financed.
And then the programme protects the enterprise. We work on the unglamorous plumbing -the institutes, the standards, the governance, the partnerships with the private sector and development finance -so that the value a Nigerian creator makes finally stays in Nigerian hands. We are currently working with relevant government stakeholders, and very closely in particular with the Ministry of arts, culture and creative economy, on a IP securitization framework to ensure that IP becomes something of value for creators.
Skills to make the work. Capital to fund the work. Structure to keep the value of the work. That is iDICE. That is the staircase. All we are asking is that the nation climb it together.
The Future -the storyteller and the machine
Now, I would be dishonest if I stood here in 2026 and spoke about the future of the creative economy without naming the force that is already remaking it: artificial intelligence. And I know the fear in this room, because I share the caution -that the machine will flatten our voice, that it will make every story sound the same, that it will take the bread from the animator and the editor and the writer. That fear is not foolish. But hear me clearly: AI is not the end of the Nigerian storyteller. It is the largest amplifier the Nigerian storyteller has ever been handed.
Consider what is already true. Nollywood is now the fifth-largest film industry on earth, valued at about eight billion dollars, and more than seventy per cent of the watch-time on Nigerian content comes from outside Nigeria.
Afrobeats crossed thirteen billion streams in a single year. And this year, Google reported that young Nigerians are quietly turning to AI not to replace their craft, but to learn it -to master the guitar, to dub a film into Yoruba with the lips still moving in perfect time, to grade “Lagos at dusk” onto footage in seconds instead of days. That is the future in miniature: a young creator in Aba or Nsukka who no longer needs a Hollywood budget to reach a Hollywood audience, because the barrier that used to cost millions now costs a data plan. But -and this is the whole point -a tool is only ever as powerful as the hands that hold it. If we do not train those hands, the value of this revolution will simply be exported, and we will become consumers of our own genius all over again.
So the future of our creative economy is not a choice between the human and the machine. It is a partnership between the storyteller and the tool – and our task, the task of iDICE and of everyone in this room, is to make sure the storyteller is Nigerian, the skills are Nigerian, and the value stays Nigerian.
THE CALL – COLLECTIVE WORK
But I need to be truthful with you before I sit down. iDICE cannot do this alone. Government cannot do this alone. iDICE announcements may sound lovely and nice in a press release. A programme such as this is a spark. It is not a fire.
The fire only catches when the ecosystem, both in this room and those not here, when the ecosystem leans in.
To the financiers in the room -and every institution in these seats -stop treating a film slate like a personal loan and start treating it like the asset class it has become everywhere else on earth. The creative sector is not charity. It is the highest-growth, youngest, most exportable industry you are not yet lending to.
To corporate Nigeria – your next great brand campaign, your next market, your next reason a young customer trusts you, will be written by the very creators in this room. Commission them. Co-invest with them. Do not just sponsor the summit -fund the sector.
To government. Especially state and local governments, – protect the intellectual property of creators as fiercely as we protect an oil pipeline, and move at the speed of the creator, not the speed of the government.
And to the creators -the ones for whom every institution in this hall ultimately exists -keep telling the story. Tell the story of the founder and the fashion designer. But tell, too, the story of the soldier in the trench, and the widow at the door waiting for a husband that is never coming home, and every Nigerian whose courage has gone unrecorded. Because when you do, you are not just entertaining us. You are doing for Nigeria what a fighter pilot did for a foreign navy in 1986. You are selling this country to the world -not the Nigeria of the headlines, but the Nigeria of the highlights. The one that is funny, and brilliant, and most importantly brave, and unbreakable, and worth believing in.
CLOSE
The theme of this summit is Creativity, Culture and Nigeria’s Next Chapter. So let me leave you with this.
The next chapter of Nigeria will not be written by the government alone, and it will not be written by the private sector alone. It will be co-written – by the creator and the financier, by the policymaker and the entrepreneur, by everyone in this room deciding that our story is too valuable to leave untold and too powerful to leave unfunded.
South Korea sold the world a song. America sold the world a pilot. It is Nigeria’s turn to sell the world a story – and this time, let us own it, finance it, and keep it.
The Story We Have Not Yet Told: Creativity, Culture and Nigeria’s Next Chapter was delivered as a keynote address at the QEDNG Creative Powerhouse Summit 2.0 on Tuesday 11 August 2026, by Ife Adebayo , National Coordinator, Investment in Digital and Creative Enterprises (iDICE)