Who Owns Africa's Creativity? Nigeria's Bold Attempt to Capture Value
And what the rest of Africa should be paying attention to
For years, Africa’s creative economy has been loud, visible, and globally influential. Music travels. Films circulate. Fashion trends jump continents. But the value behind that creativity has remained stubbornly fragile.
Creators build cultural assets. Platforms extract reach. Brands harvest attention. What rarely happens is the final, critical step: turning creative work into bankable economic assets.
Nigeria now wants to change that.
In late 2024, the Federal Executive Council approved the National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS), a sweeping framework scheduled for implementation in 2026. Its ambition is simple but radical for Africa’s creative sector: make intellectual property something banks can value, investors can finance, and creators can leverage beyond brand deals.
If it works, it could redraw how Africa treats creative ownership. If it fails, it will expose just how hard structural reform really is.
Why Nigeria’s IP Shift Matters
Nigeria’s services sector already accounts for over half of national GDP, with creativity sitting quietly inside that number. Film, music, publishing, software, fashion, and media drive cultural exports, yet remain economically underleveraged.
Official estimates suggest Nigeria loses around $3 billion annually to weak IP enforcement. That figure is not abstract. It shows up as pirated films, unlicensed music use, copied fashion designs, software theft, and zero downstream royalties.
IP, at its core, is not about protection for protection’s sake. It is the legal proof of ownership that allows creative work to be valued, traded, financed, or securitised. Without that proof, creativity remains culturally powerful but economically soft.
Before NIPPS: A Patchwork System That Couldn’t Scale
Nigeria is not new to IP laws. The Copyright Act of 2022 strengthened protection for written and audiovisual works. Trademark, patent, and design laws exist. But the system stopped short where modern creative economies now operate.
Emerging IP forms such as trade secrets, databases, integrated circuits, geographical indications, and utility models were either weakly protected or not protected at all. That gap mattered.
Integrated circuits power animation tools, gaming consoles, VR hardware, sound engineering equipment, and AI-driven post-production. Trade secrets protect proprietary workflows in studios and creative tech startups. Geographical indications protect cultural products like Adire, turning heritage into export-grade value.
Without clear frameworks, creators and companies relied on legal improvisation. Investors hesitated. Foreign IP owners stayed cautious. Nigerian creatives lost reciprocal protection abroad. Creativity moved fast. The law did not.
The Core Shift: Making Creative IP Bankable
NIPPS targets the most difficult problem in Africa’s creative economy: finance.
Today, Nigerian banks technically allow intangible assets as collateral. In practice, they avoid it. Why? No standard valuation frameworks. No liquid IP resale markets. No specialist IP assessors. High perceived risk.
Even the Central Bank’s Creative Industry Financing Initiative relied more on personal guarantees than IP-backed lending. This created a valuation stalemate. Banks would not lend because IP could not be valued. Markets could not form because banks would not lend.
NIPPS attempts to break that loop. Over a five-year window, IP administrators are mandated to work with the CBN and professional bodies to create IP registration systems, standard valuation methodologies, and financing frameworks for loans, VC, and securitisation.
This opens the door to something Africa rarely sees: creators selling shares of future earnings, not just content. That is structural change, not symbolism.
Fixing the Legal Plumbing Creatives Depend On
Beyond finance, NIPPS addresses the legal blind spots that have quietly undermined African creativity.
Trade secrets legislation would protect proprietary workflows, algorithms, and processes beyond simple NDAs. Integrated circuits protection would cover custom creative hardware, gaming devices, and specialised production tools. Geographical indications could turn cultural heritage into premium export assets, preventing foreign mass producers from hijacking African identity while allowing artisans to command higher prices globally.
A proposed industrial property tribunal would fast-track disputes currently buried in overcrowded courts. For creatives, speed matters. A design defended three years later is already obsolete.
The Royalty Problem Nobody Likes to Talk About
Royalty collection remains one of Nigeria’s weakest creative links. Despite operating collecting societies, payouts remain negligible. Enforcement is weak. Trust is low. Infrastructure is thin.
CISAC’s 2025 Global Royalties Report shows that South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Morocco accounted for 73% of Africa’s €90 million collections in 2024. Nigeria, despite its output dominance, barely registers. That gap is not talent. It is systems.
NIPPS proposes stronger oversight of collecting societies, enforced compliance by IP users, and national and sub-national data collection in partnership with WIPO. If implemented, it would finally allow Nigerian creativity to be counted, licensed, and paid for properly.
This Is Bigger Than Nigeria
Nigeria is not alone in this struggle. It is simply the most visible.
Across Africa, creatives export culture but import monetisation. Platforms extract data but return limited value. Governments celebrate culture but underinvest in IP infrastructure. Kenya, Morocco, South Africa, Ghana, and Senegal all face versions of the same challenge. Informal creativity thrives. Formal systems lag.
If Nigeria succeeds, it creates a policy blueprint other African states can adapt: IP-backed financing, fast-track creative courts, cultural asset protection, and data-driven royalty systems.
If Nigeria fails, it will confirm that Africa’s creative problem is not imagination, but execution.
The Real Test Ahead
NIPPS is ambitious. It is technical. It is slow-moving by design. Its success will not be measured by press releases, but by outcomes:
Can a filmmaker borrow against a script catalogue?
Can a designer protect a heritage pattern abroad?
Can a music producer earn royalties five years later?
Can creative IP survive outside brand sponsorships?
If the answer becomes yes, Nigeria will have done something rare in Africa’s creative economy: built infrastructure instead of hype.
And if Africa is serious about turning culture into capital, this is the direction the continent must move. Not louder creativity. Stronger ownership.
A guest post by
A curious mind exploring the crossroads of creativity and insight.