Pretty Okafor, President, Performing Musicians Employers Association of
Nigerian (PMAN), says he is on the verge of unlocking a gold mine of
wealth for Nigerian musicians; and indeed anyone in the creative
industry, through a scheme that ensures automatic payment when their
work is used. He spoke with Nseobong Okon-Ekong and Yinka Olatunbosun

Most people think he goes by his stage name everywhere. Unknown to them,
Pretty is actually his real name. It was not easy to find an English
equivalent of the Igbo version, Mmachukwu (the beauty of God). Beauty
would have sufficed, but his mother thought it would point to a woman.
She opted for Pretty, which she considered modest and not capable of
raising wrong insinuations. Pretty Okafor and his music partner, Junior
who were known as Junior and Pretty would go on to make modest
achievements on the Nigerian entertainment scene, becoming one of the
pioneer rap artistes in Nigeria with the era-shaping album, ‘Monica’.
They set the pace in comical rap artistry but the laughter seemed to
have ended for their numerous fans when Junior passed on. Although,
Junior’s demise set Pretty back emotionally, a great deal, he pulled
himself back from the brink to pursue a full and engaging life.

Growing up with Junior, his untimely exit left a vacuum that is yet to
be filled. Pretty became uncomfortable with the people they were working
with and the society at large. He couldn’t bring himself to drop an
album.

Being an introvert, every time he tried to sing in a studio, he felt
something was not right. Somehow, he knew he had to go out to meet
people. He could not remain a recluse forever. He has since resolved to
go back to the studio and do a lot of remixes of the older songs and bar
code them. He plans to get some younger artistes to jump on some songs,
in order to breathe fresh air into them

Meanwhile,
Pretty went on to a very exhilarating period in the corporate event
promotion world. Following his partner’s death, he resigned his
appointment from the company where he was the operations manager. He was
not married at the time, but he felt he had to take care of his late
friend’s wife and three children. He set up shop and launched himself
into business. Today, he runs three successful companies under the name,
Pretty Boy Entertainment, including one of the biggest sound system
procurement and leasing companies, an events company and a logistics
company. From producing shows and concerts, his colleagues sort him out
and persuaded him to assume leadership of the Performing Musicians
Employers Association of Nigeria (PMAN).

That may seem ironical as he hadn’t physically performed on stage since
Junior died. His performance only took a geographical turn-backstage,
making behind- the- scenes impacts.

Since he came on board as PMAN President, Pretty pursued a single
agendum. To him, nothing else matters if a musician is not able to
create sustainable wealth from his works. In the past few years, he has
devoted himself to a campaign to create structures that will transform
the living condition of Nigerian artistes. From a study that he
commissioned a consortium of Nigerian companies, it was discovered that
Nigerian music is number one in Africa and number three in the world.
Nigerian entertainment industry is worth about N9 billion.

That mouth-watering revelation was received when we met Pretty, tucked
in a corner of a fast food outlet along the well-lit aisle inside the
Ikeja City Mall.

“I travelled to Barbados as well as Trinidad and Tobago and I found out
that they buy Nigerian music a lot. Their government collects taxes on
the Nigerian music that the citizens buy. But in Nigeria, our government
does not collect tax or royalty because they don’t know how to go about
it.”

A widely travelled person, Pretty has witnessed first-hand, how the
economy of certain countries abroad are sustained through the
entertainment industry. Today, many free download sites are forced to
shut down or redirect their culprits to another site where viruses
accompany illegal downloads. In the end, it is more economical to
purchase the creative works than to steal them.

It set him thinking this can be replicated in Nigeria. As soon as the
opportunity came through his elevation as President of PMAN, he began to
engage relevant corporate bodies with several convincing presentations
loaded with facts and figures. It took repeated knocking on their doors.
And Pretty preaches it as a gospel. Thankfully, a lot of them have
started paying attention to the industry. “The statistics and the
research we did are accurate.

We can actually raise between N1516 billion every year. There will be a
lot of tax coming to the federal and state governments. The banks got
excited; the corporate organizations got excited and the research
organizations too got involved and they realized that there hasn’t been
any monitoring scheme in place. I will give you an example. In 2015, I
said it on Channels Television that Nigeria has already gone into
recession. It was in the last quarter of 2016 that government admitted
that we are in recession. The only way that the country can get out of
recession is when we put in place and operate a credible structure that
promotes and sustains a creative economy. I am referring to all the
royalties earned from intellectual property.”

Though we were tucked into a corner with Pretty, that was not the reason
we were not overwhelmed by excited fans. Pretty may be the arrowhead of
the musicians’ body in Nigeria, but his face is likely to be lost in a
crowd. To be sure, he enjoys the obscurity. Often, he uses himself as an
example in his homily as he goes around the country, canvassing support
from musicians for the wealth creation cum welfare scheme that would
not only take them out of the woods, but ensure they live a modest live
till they pass. “The active live of a musician when he is famous and
much sort after is about four years. After that, society is hungry and
ready for the next star who will create a new round of excitement

This
is what I have been telling my colleagues. Remember that PMAN had been
moribund for over 15 years before we became executives. I had to do a
lot of work, a lot of mass mobilization, campaign and communication to
redirect the association, corporate bodies and individual musicians. You
are working with artistes who are spread across the country in 36
states and the Federal Capital Territory, there is a lot of funding
needed to reach five million members. We have talked about how to use
the biometrics card to get loan. Not up to one thousand artistes have
the biometrics card because we are yet to launch it. It was released
last year, in the first quarter. All PMAN executives have the card. We
had it before the last PMAN elections. It was because of this work that I
was voted to remain as PMAN president. I wasn’t going to come back. I
wanted to face my business.

I own a marketing communications firm, events technology firm and an
event leasing firm. I am doing a whole lot in entertainment. We are
working with the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria Interbank Settlement

System, Heritage Bank, Union Bank, Airtel and Hogg Robinson. If any
artiste is critically ill, he can be airborne within 12 hours to any
part of the world. The family of the ailing artist also gets N5million

from Hogg Robinson. We started this in 2014. We don’t have to go begging for anyone to contribute for an artiste who is ill.”

“Luckily for us, the younger generation of artistes have bought into the
concept and it has become a lifestyle. We made the structure look like
the normal day-to-day activity. It is something that can be done using a
smart-phone. It is nothing extraordinary. You can do the registration
using your smart-phone. You can go to the bank to make your payment and
you can also pay through your phone. You will automatically get all your
benefits. Around the world, we have the same structure running. It
includes a pension plan, welfare, life insurance, bar coding and
encoding of IP. As persons in the creative industry, we are known as the
informal sector by the banks.

Because of this, we don’t have access to funding. But the card we have
introduced is connected to your BVN, that is all your accounts, it is
your collateral to have access to bank funding. A lot of people say this
is Nigeria, it is never going to work. I don’t believe that. It is
working. Some artistes have been getting their royalty. What we have
done is to globalize the creative industry in Nigeria. If you go to
South Africa, all their CDs are bar coded. But you can never see any CD
that is bar coded in Nigeria.”

Much of what he is doing as President of PMAN comes from his ability to
stay the course in the music industry. “I am active. I have been a
producer of concerts. I have been producing road shows. I have not been
on stage since Junior died 12 years ago. I have been interested in the
welfare of artistes long before I stopped performing. When Junior was
alive, we talked about getting our career back on track.

When we released ‘Monica’, our first album, we didn’t get our royalties
from Premier Music. That was when Junior and I would go on the streets
and chase pirates. We would take our works from them. We would go to
Alaba Market. We were frustrating them. We made money from concerts and
events management. We performed in South Africa and UK with the help of
Red14. They were the ones managing the Benson and Hedges Golden Tones
Concert.”

Pretty is not at all perturbed by the naivety of artistes who
voluntarily release their music for free download. “Once your songs are
automatically bar coded and encoded, it goes viral. There’s a key on it
so every time it is downloaded, you will get paid. Some pirates don’t
want the structure that can reorganize the industry to work.”

Such retrogressive attitudes are not to be found only among pirates
only. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues are hell bent on throwing
cogs in the wheel of progress. This explains why PMAN is permanently at
war with itself. “I think as musicians, we are stubborn in nature;
coupled with poverty, because no PMAN member had received royalties in
the past 35 years of PMAN’s existence. They don’t have any other means
of survival. PMAN was like a means to an end. Whatever they got were not
proper royalties. That is not what can make an artiste become a
billionaire. We are talking about getting money from sale of creative
works; the number of times the album is sold and the copies sold
worldwide. The older ones don’t understand what we are trying to do

You
can put a call to Charly Boy and Daniel Wilson, they will understand
because they are enlightened. But the much older ones don’t understand.
They want a union that can move from table-to-table, begging for them.
That is not the kind of association I want to run. I want to run the
kind of standard where musicians can afford a house on Banana Island.”

Pretty does not share the view that the exit of international recording
companies from Nigeria in the 90s is the reason for mainstream piracy.
“They left because they couldn’t make return on investment and the
structure had become so porous. They left because Nigerians started
buying on the streets instead of buying from the shops. Pirates chased
them away since they couldn’t recoup the money invested in the
musicians. They were not making sales anymore. This same structure that
we are talking about is the only thing that can bring them back. You can
track and collate sales with this new system of bar coding. We are one
of the biggest entertainment industry in the world because our brand of
music is played around the world.”

One gridlock that Pretty has to deal with is the general apathy of
artistes to this new structure. Groomed under the regime of piracy, many
artistes still believe that the system will fail. For Pretty, it is
never-say- never for a system that will save artistes from being
eternally oblivious to their album sales and end the shame of perpetual
begging for huge medical expenses from the general public. When you read
about well-accomplished musicians in other climes, their album sales
and ratings are essential part of their history. In Nigeria, not even
the top flying artistes have proper documentation of their album sales.
But with this technologically-enabled tracking system, it is goodbye to
the era of poor musicians and family.

With Pretty’s wealth creation and welfare campaign, even a dead artiste is assured his due.