Just days before the new year, a controversy involving Rahma Sadau, one of Northern Nigeria’s most visible actresses, influencers, and cultural entrepreneurs, briefly shook the Northern creative space. The dispute was about a spoken word artist, Hafsat Shehu Magaji, who was contracted to produce promotional material for the maiden edition of the Arewa International Film Festival. The artist delivered the work, but what followed exposed a familiar fault line in Nigeria’s creative economy: the routine exploitation of intellectual labour.
The spoken word performance was published on Rahma Sadau’s Instagram and Facebook pages without credit to the artist, despite prior agreement. More troublingly, the artist alleged that she was denied full payment for her work.
When Hafsat protested publicly, she was met not with quiet resolution but with a groundswell of solidarity from the Northern literary community, which demanded acknowledgement, compensation, and respect for creative labour.
While the immediate issue appeared to be resolved by public pressure, the heat has cooled, and the episode has become something more than a trending scandal. It opened a floodgate of shared grievances, stories of unpaid labour, erased credits, and “exposure instead of payment” arrangements that have become normalized in Nigeria’s cultural industries.
This essay uses the Arewa International Film Festival incident as a lens to interrogate intellectual property, power relations, and labour exploitation within Nigeria’s creative economy, particularly from the perspective of writers, spoken word artists, and content creators.
Creativity Without Protection
Nigeria’s creative sector is often celebrated as vibrant, youthful, and globally competitive. Nollywood, Kannywood, music, fashion, and digital content creation have become symbols of soft power and economic promise. Yet despite this optimism, there lies a weak institutional framework for protecting intellectual labour.
Copyright laws exist in Nigeria, but their enforcement remain inconsistent. The nature of contracts are often informal or verbal. Many creatives, especially emerging writers and artists, operate without legal literacy, bargaining power, or institutional backing. In an environment such as ours in Nigeria, visibility becomes currency, and exploitation is easily disguised as opportunity.
The Arewa International Film Festival, as a cultural milestone for Northern Nigeria, is meant to signal growth, inclusion, and artistic recognition. Ironically, the scandal surrounding its promotion revealed how deeply entrenched exploitative practices remain, even within initiatives that claim to uplift local talent.
Power, Inequality, and Cultural Capital
From a sociological standpoint, this incident is best understood through the lens of power asymmetry and cultural capital.
Rahma Sadau occupies a position of immense symbolic and social capital. She commands a large audience, industry access, and institutional legitimacy. The spoken word artist, by contrast, represents a class of creatives whose labour is visible but whose bargaining power is limited. This imbalance creates conditions where contracts can be ignored, credits withheld, and payments renegotiated unilaterally.
Although Hafsat is a student of Law at Bayero University Kano, she unfortunately found herself in this quagmire because the imbalance of power is very much pronounced.
It took the effort of many creatives with influential voices and lawyers with concern for fighting for the rights of the downtrodden to bring Rahma Sadau and her Festivals’ team to issue a press statement that has some level of decorum after they initially issued one that was both threatening and unprofessional.
The episode further exposes how arrogant those at the higher ladder in the creative industry feel, putting themselves on a pedestal that seem to absolve them of any responsibility, when in reality they owe much of their success to creatives like Hafsat.
The Normalization of Exploitation
What made the Rahma Sadau episode resonate so widely was how familiar it felt. Writers, poets, photographers, designers, and videographers across Northern Nigeria and beyond shared similar experiences: unpaid gigs, missing credits, and the constant pressure to be grateful for exposure.
For many creatives, refusing such arrangements carries social and professional risks. Speaking out can mean being labeled difficult or ungrateful, particularly in tightly knit cultural spaces. This culture of silence ensures that exploitation is reproduced, not challenged.
Accountability and the Problem of Celebrity Culture
One uncomfortable aspect of this controversy is how celebrity culture often shields powerful individuals from accountability. In Nigeria, fame frequently functions as a substitute for institutional regulation. Influencers and cultural figures are treated as benevolent patrons rather than employers bound by contracts and ethical obligations.
Yet organizing a film festival, commissioning promotional content, and monetizing public attention are not informal favours. They are professional activities. When creators fail to acknowledge or pay collaborators, it is not a misunderstanding. It is a labour violation.
Intellectual Property as a Social Justice Issue
Intellectual property is often discussed as a legal or technical matter, but in countries like Nigeria, it is fundamentally a social justice issue. When creators lack protection, the most marginalized bear the brunt.
The spoken word artist’s experience highlights how easily creative work can be detached from its creator once it enters digital space. Social media accelerates this erasure, allowing content to circulate without attribution while accruing value for those with larger audiences.
What Must Change
The Arewa International Film Festival controversy offers an opportunity for reflection and reform. Several lessons emerge:
- Contracts must be normalized, even in creative and cultural collaborations.
- Credit is not optional; attribution is a basic ethical standard.
- Creative communities must sustain solidarity, not only during scandals but structurally.
- Institutions and festivals must model best practices, especially when claiming to support local talent.
Conclusion
The outrage surrounding the Rahma Sadau incident has faded, as social media storms inevitably do. But the structural issues it revealed remain unresolved. Intellectual property abuse is not an anomaly in Nigeria’s creative economy; it is a pattern sustained by inequality, silence, and weak enforcement.
If the Arewa International Film Festival is to symbolize a new chapter for Northern creativity, it must also provoke a deeper reckoning with how creative labour is valued. Writers, spoken word artists, and content creators are not accessories to celebrity projects. They are producers of culture, meaning, and value.
Until intellectual property is treated not as a favour but as a right, Nigeria’s creative economy will continue to rest on invisible, unpaid, and unacknowledged labour.
