By Theresa Moses
The Giant of Africa, Nigeria, is famous for producing quality contents in entertainment, innovative business ideas in the entrepreneurial sphere, creativity in built industry and more enabling talents sprouting in diverse fields. With the advent of reality TV shows in the country, a whole lot of mediocrity is being celebrated over excellent creativity, which calls for concern.
Recently, I was involved in a unique and the first of its kind CELEBRITY COME BUILD REALITY TV SHOW (watch episodes @CCBNAIJA YouTube Channel on www.youtube.com), in which the ultimate winner gets N120 million inclusive of a 5-Bedroom Duplex in Lekki, all-expense paid trip to Dubai, and more. One of the lucky viewers will win a 3-bedroom bungalow and the profit from it is designed to kick-start social-housing programme for low and middle-income earners in dignity. Twelve celebrities across Africa are on a construction site sweating and toiling, with their hands soiled as they carry head-pans of mixed sand, cement and concrete to build the two units of 3-bedroom bungalows. Although new, but despite its novelty, the shocking truth is that it’s barely gaining the deserved attention because the show is not promoting nudity or free sex.
So one wonders: Why then do we love to celebrate and spend money to sponsor group of individuals for staying in a house kissing, eating, gossiping, quarreling, fighting, sleeping, having free sex? As Covid-19 Pandemic deals with Nigerians, many are out of jobs, source of livelihood taken from them; in 71-days, over 900 million votes were cast during the season 5 of Big Brother Naija. With limited resources and hunger in the land, in 2020, over N27 billion was generated from a show of obscenity. That is, 900,000,000 votes @ N30 per sms). Why do brand managers and corporate brand promotion agencies give priority to the obscenity by sponsoring and advertising in the BBN through the years?
The novel CCBNaija is a star-studded production, which uses fun to develop home ownership, empower viewing public and built industry career cum skills acquisition. It encourages the youth as well as finds a solution to one of the fundamental societal problems – shelter.
If the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) calls on Nigerian citizens, especially its youths to vote on their mobile phones @ N10 per SMS to elect leaders that will shape their future and the country, won’t they ask the government to credit their accounts first before they will agree to vote? I guess you know the answer.
A post like this: “Incredible! CCBNAIJA Offers 3-Bedroom Bungalow to one Lucky Fan” may get 10 Comments, 12 Likes, 6 Shares and 20 views because of the reality of who we are as people and where our priority lies as citizens; whereas the post, “Big Brother Naija: Medline caught on camera having sex with William will get 180.7k Comments, 300.3k Likes, 170.8k Shares and 570k views.
Just as Mr. Gbola Oba, Visioner/Co-Founder, www.ulda-edu.ng and CCBNAIJA says: “I’m confident that Nigeria will sooner be better visionaries and enterprise value-innovators (the class that I stubbornly resolve to belong), must not be tired chasing good ideas with integrity.”
I believe we all, especially corporate Nigeria, have a choice to either change the narrative or be part of the immorality doom befalling Nigeria.
