Nurudeen Sanni and his crew had been shooting a documentary in Ajah, in Lagos, for about half an hour when several men surrounded them and asked for 100,000 naira, about $75, before the filming could go on. While the crew negotiated, one of the men slapped a crew member who was trying to protect the cameras. A scuffle followed. The men produced knives and cutlasses, the crew ran, and one member was stabbed in the neck and seriously injured, Sanni said. “The painful part was that we saw a member of our crew being beaten and we could not do anything,” Sanni, a 40-year-old sound recordist, told Al Jazeera’s Pelumi Salako.
That is the worst version of a problem that filmmakers, content creators, photographers and journalists in Lagos say they run into all the time. The men involved are generally called agberos, the local word for street touts, some of whom collect levies from commercial transport operators. They are accused of demanding money from people filming in public and threatening anyone who refuses to pay.
Most of the incidents are less violent than Sanni’s, and the money in them is a lot easier to follow. The actress and content creator KieKie has described being approached by men after shooting a short video in Obalende. They asked for one million naira, about $750. After some negotiation she paid about 700,000 naira, about $525. So she bargained them down roughly 30%, which is a good result in a negotiation where she had nothing to sell and nothing to gain except being left alone. For another shoot, around Kara near Berger, she said she spent close to 500,000 naira on security, which is about $375 paid ahead of time to avoid paying it afterwards.
The price of leaving
Nabila Okino, an analyst at the risk advisory firm Africa Practice, explained the economics clearly enough that it could go in a textbook:
Because filmmakers often need to shoot in specific locations, those demanding money know that there is a cost to abandoning a location and starting again, which gives them leverage to extract cash.
Economists call this a holdup. Once you have put money into something you can’t move (the location fee, the hired cameras, the crew paid by the day, the lights already set up), anyone who can stop you from finishing gets to charge you up to whatever it would cost to pack up and start somewhere else. The touts don’t need to know your budget. They just need to know you’ve already spent a lot of it. That also tells you why the shakedowns tend to arrive once the shoot has started rather than before it, and why they are aimed at people with a lot of equipment.
The music video director ThankGod Omori, known as TG Omori, had paid for the entire location for a night shoot in Ikoyi and found out that paying for it wasn’t sufficient. He said a crowd demanding money interrupted the shoot at about 3am. He handed the set to his assistant directors and security staff with one scene still unshot, and the following morning learned that the men had forced their way through a gate and hurt a security guard who had refused to let them in, as PUNCH reported. Al Jazeera puts his account in August. Legit.ng reported his description from a podcast released in September, in which he said more than 30 men turned up, that “I’ve paid for the whole location, sorted everybody, paid security, and from nowhere I see thugs springing out,” and called the practice a “pandemic” in Nigeria’s creative industry.
Stanley Ikechukwu, an analyst at the Lagos-based firm SBM Intelligence, called it a “war on camera” and described the expense in simple accounting terms: “A filmmaker has to budget for ‘settlement’ on top of camera rental, location, crew, and food. It increases cost. It kills spontaneity; you cannot just see a beautiful Lagos moment and capture it.” Settlement is now one of the line items. A September roundup by WithinNigeria listed other cases this year: a reported demand for money from Bimbo Ademoye’s film crew in April, a creator named Sirbalo who said he was asked for ₦200,000, and commercial bus drivers on the Iyana Ipaja and Iyana Iba routes who reportedly stopped work on September 14 in protest at alleged extortion.
Paying to be covered
For journalists the cost is less about money and more about what never gets reported. Karina Adobaba-Harry, a camera operator for the Nigerian channel News Central, was covering the demolition of Makoko in January when local men told her crew to pay before they could film. “That was funny to me because we are here to tell your story, you want the government to hear your voice … and you want us to still pay you,” she said. She said these demands happen to her regularly. Some men leave when she tells them she has no money, and others threaten to take or damage her camera. Reporters have sometimes paid with their own money or from miscellaneous funds their employer provides. She said she has learned to act tougher: “Sometimes, you have to take up the persona of the agbero.” She also said reporting it seldom achieves anything, because “if it is just a case of wanting to take money from you, nobody will care.”
Ikechukwu’s concern is what this does to the news itself: reporters will start staying away from certain areas, he said, “and the news will only come from ‘safe’ places.” That is a holdup with a second victim. The person with the camera pays the cost, but if the reporter leaves, it is the flood or fire or protest that goes uncovered.
Tourists pay as well. In September the Chinese travel creator Xiao Jony posted a video of men confronting him while he filmed in a Lagos market, as Nigerian outlets reported at the time. He said he passed more than 20 checkpoints where people asked him for money over a distance of about 10 kilometres, which works out to one at least every 500 metres. Who ran the checkpoints, and whether any of them had a connection to a government agency, is still unknown. Okino said producers might decide that neighbouring countries offer “more predictable and straightforward filming environments.” Ikechukwu summed it up: “We tell the world, ‘Come to Lagos,’ but our own behaviour says, ‘Don’t bring your camera.’”
Lagos state’s official position leaves no room for doubt. Gbenga Omotosho, the commissioner for information and strategy, said nobody has the authority to charge people for photographing or filming in public, and that such cases “will be handled by the police, the government will not stand for that nonsense.” Okino suggested the authorities work with community leaders and with market and park associations to set out clear rules for filming in public.
For now the rules are being set on the street. Jean-Fidele E Ananou, a 31-year-old photojournalist, used to go out every day to photograph what he considers the beauty of the city. He has stopped, out of concern for his safety and his equipment. A holdup only pays as long as people keep bringing in something worth holding up, and he no longer brings his camera.