I would say I’m not a full-time filmmaker. My last film was released last year. Before that, it was 2021. The film I made in 2021 is a feature film. It’s making money, currently on Showmax and African Magic. The amount of the money is another discussion, though. With the way distribution goes in Nigeria, you can’t really rely on it. It’s one of those things that you just kind of stack up a lot of IPs and they would be bringing money. The approach I’m trying to have is to own my time and do a lot of things that can make money while I’m living my life. Like right now, I sell a lot of stock footage. I create it once, I do metadata, and as you increase the number of assets in your portfolio, earnings increase, and it becomes reliable. That’s my ideal lifestyle. Basically, creating stuff and using it to make money. The other way I make money is through NGOs. We currently have some agreements and if they like you, they get in touch with you and things happen. There are some months when the work is stacked and you just manage it as you go.
I worked full-time from 2018 to 2020. I finished uni in 2015, did NYSC, and went to film school. Then I found this work opportunity at an NGO. It’s crazy thinking about what they were paying us. I think I was mostly there just to please my family. When COVID happened and funding priorities changed, they were going to let us go. But for me, just as a commentary on how shitty the pay was, I resigned. I told my family they let us go. For a while, as long as what I was making was more than what I was previously paid, I was like, yeahh, I’m alright. It has just kind of picked up from there. My take-home salary then was 124,000 Naira, and they wanted to be your only business, on top 124k! It just did not make sense.
My mom’s generation, they are the ones who could stay with one job for 30 years. But the world has moved on from that. In my 9-5, they gave us an annual leave of 22 working days and at Christmas, they shut down for the year and deduct like nine of those days from you. I’m not the one who asked you to shut down, so now I have to manage 13 days. And those 13 days, I can’t take it at once. You are told, Okay, for the first half of the year, you can take one week. I was thinking, this is not life. Three months into the job, I had seen them finish. COVID year, I was trying to leave in April. I stayed till September because again, uncertainty. Let me just be collecting the paycheck. The HR person that came up with that thing, only God can judge them. Employers should plan their affairs, so that people can have a life and take breaks.
The way the skydiving started: I was in the second or third year at the University of East Anglia and there was a skydiving society. A friend and myself were interested in getting our licence, so we joined the society. For some reason, that year, the committee was the most ineffective. Basically we paid our membership fee and the ball didn’t get rolling at any point. We were very disapppointed. During the summer holiday in 2015, my cousin and I were not back to Nigeria yet. We found like three spots in the UK where you could skydive. The one we went to was somewhere called Beccles. At this point, I had zero experience, so it was going to be tandem. All you need to do is be attached to somebody and just do what they tell you and you’ll be alright. The plane is narrow, so from one door, everybody scoots to the back. Because of this, the last person to get on is the first to jump, and that was me. They reassure you that there is a backup chute and there’s hardly ever any accident. It’s not as scary as you think. The instructor attached me to himself and we started scooting to the front of the plane. They opened the door and for a good 20 or 30 seconds, I was just suspending from the plane while the guy’s ass was at the edge of the door. You are supposed to do some kind of superman pose, so that aerodynamics can work in your favour, because you don’t want to spin out of control. You have to take formation. I was just hanging with my thoughts. You free-fall for maybe 30 seconds to one minute. For the first 15 seconds, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see. When I figured out I was alright, I then opened them and enjoyed the view. After that, it’s just something you want to go to different locations in the world and do, you know. Because like skydiving over the Palms in Dubai is different.
I think over time, you just see risk-taking as being a bit more fruitful. Sometimes, you’re going through stuff and then you feel like the world is against you and things can’t be figured out or something. For me, I kinda just saw everything as small, and I guess the kind of mentality the experience gave me is that everything is about perspective. Depending on how you look at stuff, you can make it big or small. Moving off from that, I just resolved to be like, if something is not life-threatening, there is no reason to stress over it. I felt empowered. It just gave me the confidence to do stuff afraid. After that, I’ve done scuba diving, I’ve done abseiling – going off the edge of a cliff with rope… all scary stuff. I don’t think I did any crazy thing before this.
Being in Nigeria has definitely suffocated my desire for adventure. I took some opportunities when I was in school. There is one time me and my cousin had Schengen visa because when you apply from any other country, they are a bit more open-minded — they are looking at the economic situation in Nigeria and thinking you’ll run. I had the visa and travelled to like four other countries. I took the bus to Wales, flew to Ireland, flew to Belgium, took the train to Paris, and train to London. Some months later, my cousin and I decided to go to Germany. We were there for like 48 hours. We landed in Munich, visited the Mercedes Benz museum & Porsche museum in Stuttgart. We also drove 600 km each way to Berlin and back, testing the highest speeds we’ve ever known on the Autobahn. From that experience, you get what German machines (Benz, BMW, Audi) are made for. We visited a section of the Berlin Wall, the Brandenburg Gate, and all that. Since I got back fully in 2017, last year was the first time I would get Schengen tourist visa from Nigeria. It was crazy. At some point, you’re just kind of defeated and resigned to fate as a Nigerian. Last year, I spent a lot of money on visa applications. Before I got the French one, I applied to Portugal. I did an appeal because they didn’t have any basis to deny me. I’d held multiple visas, I always left on time, and had all the supporting documents. When you’re unemployed with no assets, they tell you you’re unemployed, you don’t have money and you’ll elope… but then you have all these things. I’m like, I have this history, dude. I’m going to come back to my country. I’m telling you I have ongoing work agreements with these people, I’ll be back to continue the work. It’s just not fair. My moonshot is perhaps to purchase a new passport. Too bad that all of them recently hiked the prices. How much can you even do while in Nigeria? You want to go to Ikogosi in Ekiti, there’s bad roads, so many hazards and you might be kidnapped. Throughout my road trip to Ghana this year, the only flights I took were within Nigeria – the flight to Lagos – because of the stress and drama on Nigerian roads.
Anyhoo, I’m not slowing down anytime soon. I plan to keep exploring God’s green earth, experiencing humanity, discovering delicacies and speaking foreign tongues. You might even get lots of travel content and artistic expressions from me, but in the meantime, let me get over my millennial tendency to hoard content.
As narrated by: SELE GOT (ABUJA, NIGERIA)
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