Senior Correspondent, Daniel Abia, she opens up on her new role as a teacher and what she is doing about her Create Institute and declared that she would not hesitate to vote for President Goodluck Jonathan
The mere mention of Hilda Dokubo, what readily comes to mind is acting. Is your life all about acting?
A lot of people like to describe me as an actress but I like to describe myself as the teacher. Teaching gives me the audacity to share with other people my experiences, my feelings and my knowledge without the fear of losing it. It gives me the audacity to be free with other people without the fear of being misquoted or disputed. It gives me the opportunity to be real to myself and environment. So I am more of a teacher than actress although I trained both as an actress and as a teacher. My first degree is in performing art and my second degree is on education both from UNIPORT (University of Port Harcourt). I am not quitting acting but I am just reducing the number of time because acting is really demanding for me. When I am on location, for somebody like me, I want to give it my best. Giving it my time means that I have less time for myself and other activities. What I have done is to reduce the number of movies that I do in a year to increase the
amount of time that I have to share my energies, my strength, my knowledge with others. I am creating a balance for the two things that I trained as.
How would you compareNollyhood withHollyhood; are we in any way making any positive progress?
It is not a very fair assessment between Nollyhood and Hollywood in terms of age. Nollywood has just turned 20 years now while Hollywood is about 100. You can see that 20 years gap is not a child’s play. In terms of environment and quality of equipment, it is also very difficult to compare. Also, their weather favours their equipment. We have seen them come here to shoot and they have to wait because the temperature you have here is not the same that they have there for shooting. In terms of financing, those who finance movies in Hollywood are business people in Hollywood. They are in the business of film funding because they want to be part of what is going on. But the people who fund movies in Nigeria are marketers. These are people who just trade on the end product. It will be difficult to balance it. However, our storylines are original to us. An African is an African, a Nigerian is a Nigerian and an American is an American.
We have beautiful stories untapped and untold. A few of the movie writers we have here are trying to be Americans instead of showing that they are Nigerians. Some of them did not learn or train under a good writer. They just started writing, which is a reflection of what happened with the Onitsha writers at some point until people like ChinueAcheba, a fantastic writer, started screaming that we cannot write the way we are writing. With time, grain and chaff started separating themselves at some point. Today we are training writers and telling them that stories must be told pictorially because that is what film is all about. I think we will get there. In terms of acting, I can tell you that all the original actors that I know are fantastic. They can pull their own through no matter who you put on stage with them. In other words, whether you bring the best of Hollywood, Bollywood or any of the woods, Nollywood will knock that person out because we are original.
That is not to say that all the fine boys, fine girls artistes that we have who are not also actors who incidentally crashed into the business of acting are fantastic. Remember also that there was a time that every mallam was selling drugs in this country until chemists started kicking against them. Today in Nollywood we have people who crashed into performing art believing that if you are a performer, you are loved, you are powerful, you have money. Many people believe that artistes make so much money just in a few hours but they don’t know how much hours you have put in to do the job. The trainings, the tolerance, the perseverance, the discipline involved in this business, people don’t consider that. That is where we are today. I think that the comparison will be most unfair but I think we are going there. We are not where we started from, we are not where we are going, but it is a journey and we will get there.
What do you have to say about the issue of sex-for-role, have you been sexually harassed by the producers for any role at any time?
Every time I hear that thing, first I run into shock. When we started, we were always there together and we did not know who was a male and who was a female. We saw ourselves as entertainers and workers who had the same drive and the same passion. No producer had the time to talk to you about sex. Collaboration was the key word for us because we were all engrossed in making sure that we were successful in what we were doing. We never had those stories until recently. I have always said to people that nobody will ask sex from you if you were good. They will attempt, but you will say no. And if you are good and they know that you are good, they will allow you to act. May be the guy likes the girl or the girl likes the guy much more, I don’t know. May be they may even date themselves afterwards, I don’t know. Acting is life and it is practical, you can use the stage to show who you are. If you have to sleep with me to give me a role, then we may as well
end up not doing the job. I have heard the sex-for-role thing being discussed. I have never experienced it and I have never seen anybody who comes openly to say she was harassed. But sometimes you will hear people say, ‘ah! Why is this person behaving like this?’ And others will just answer that she slept her way into the industry. That is the most you can hear. I have never heard anybody said somebody asked her for sex-for-role. I will be glad to hear just that some day.
You said Nigerian movies are sponsored by marketers, what then, is the impact of the federal government’s recent financial assistance to the industry?
I am still waiting to hear the impact of the grant. I had applied through my Hilda DokuboCreative Art and I have not received the reply even as we speak now. I will be glad if they can make that fund accessible to us. It will be nice if we can access the fund so that we can use it to equip where we are building presently. We need to build an auditorium for our students for training and performance. It is discouraging that there is a grant and it is not accessible. I have even applied to do an animation there, but there is no reply. I don’t also know if the fund has been released.
I don’t know who is on the board of the fund. But I will wish that nobody politicise this. I don’t know who to blame at this point. The grant was not specifically for actors but actors make Nollywood to be very popular. Nollywood is the film making industry while the actors’ guild is one small portion of the Nollywood. I will really like to access that money because it is
a lot of money out there.
What gives you the greatest joy of your life: you are an actress, you are also a teacher and have been in politics, what is your cut out?
Seeing happy faces gives me joy. I get that from both jobs that I do. I held a political office but I did not play partisan politics. I chose teaching by myself. For acting I also chose. If I do acting and you follow my role, you will find out that my storyline must be issue based. It must be something that we have to communicate. I don’t accept all forms of script. Acting is the same thing as teaching and it gives me great joy. I met a woman who told me, ‘Hilda, I watched Gone Forever. But before then, I was barren for 15 years. The movies were still playing when I started praying. I forgot that you where not barren because you said somewhere in one of your interviews that you already got two sons. I thought you were barren like me. Since you were praying through to get a child, I joined you in that prayer. I prayed for three days. Today, I have twins and I named one of them Hilda and you must see them because they are your children’.
That testimony gave me joy for a whole year. People write to me to tell me their feelings. I also teach people and when they graduate, it gives me joy too. I teach you how to translate your skill into money. I teach you to realise who you really are.
How did the Create Initiative come about, what led you into it?
In 2002, I slept on my bed a total of 15 times which is an average of two weeks in a year. If you spread it out, it means that every month I slept on my bed for one day and a few hours. This is because I was on location nearly all through. Sometimes I get back to my house and I am out again. I was weaning my son at that time and I decided that I needed to take a break and concentrate on him. A busy person is always a busy person. Soon, I got bored at some point and I started going to schools to work with those kids who do not really like regular classroom. I went and requested that they come and work with me. We together took those subjects that they found difficult. We were singing and dancing. We formed acronyms with a lot of those words and I encouraged them to go back to school and beat their colleagues in school. That is what I was doing until the governor’s wife (Justice Mary Odili) who was running her adolescent project keyed into it.
A class we started with just 20 kids suddenly grew to 200. We called ourselves enlightenment crew. At that point I got the SA (special assistant) job in Dr Peter Odili’s government. I noticed that every young person I met had a dream of wanting to be like Hilda Dokubo. They wanted to be stars and to be famous. I thought of entertainment called Street Star. It was at this point that we discovered people like Timaya, Soty, Terry Wilson, Story Teller, Purity, Danny Lloyd among others from that process. It started working and ran for four years. On the fourth year, the ministry of education gave us accreditation as a national training institution. At this point we had to decide which was most important. Both were important. But one had to come before the other. While doing the admission, we also started building the institution. We started with running a scholarship programme for the poor children while the other will be strictly for children who will come through JAMB.
This is how the Create came about.
You have just graduated 50 women from your CREATE Institute, how has the journey been and why have you not integrated men also in the scheme?
Hectic. Rough. Very challenging. But highly rewarding. Our first and second graduation was both males and females. This is peculiar because this set was funded by the Amnesty Office and I was requested to do only women. The reason is clear. When the amnesty programme was mooted, there was something called classification. During that time CREATE had requested and women were part of that amnesty. There were some women who were arms bearing. When we pulled them out, the Senior Adviser to The President on Amnesty contacted four of us as consultants to do strictly classification for women which of course was anchored by CREATE. They were 799 women and we indentified how their training would go. We don’t take more than what we can handle at a time. We cannot take more than 100. Except we complete our facilities then we can go for more.
Given what you do most, acting, how do you see the international image of Nigeria in view of such happenings like the issue of insurgency and high profile corruption particularly the recent US$9.3million caught in South Africa even at a time a son of the Niger Delta is the President?
It is disheartening for us not just as Niger Deltans but as patriotic Nigerians to note that everyone of us of about 160 million people are judged by a very weak minority group. They struggle very hard to find themselves in the amount of money they got. I tell people that wealth is not money. Wealth is in contentment. It is in reasoning. Wealth is what you share with others and not what you steal and hide. I don’t know how true that story is. Everyone is alleging. I like to treat a rumour as a rumour. But if there be any truth in this, as a Nigerian my first question is, whose money was it? Why South Africa. If you steal my money as a child and use it to build a house on my land, I will be angry that you stole but I will be happy that the money is in my land. If you stole our money, why not use it to build factories where Nigerians could be employed to work in. There is nothing honourable in stealing, but you may buy our sympathy by investing it here. If
you take it to South Africa, you are only developing that country and promoting their economy. I know that President Goodluck Jonathan understands the plight of his people and that of this country because he lives his entire life in this country. Is this a conspiracy or a black mail? I am waiting for my brother to react. I am waiting for CBN (Central Bank of Nigeria) to react because there is a regulation on the amount of money that should leave this country. I am waiting for EFCC (Economic and Financial Crimes Commission) to react because they can track money. Until, they react, I will not say anything for now.
We saw how members of the Nollywood rallied round President Jonathan in the 2011 presidential election, what is your take in his second term bid as we approach 2015 election?
I will respond as Hilda Dokubo and a Niger Deltan. I will give Goodluck Jonathan my vote in 2015. Amongst everyone that has led this country in the past, President Goodluck Jonathan is the only one that has not done any hype around what he has done in this country. Nigeria has been in bondage by a very small cartel that has been trying to mess up what he is doing because he is messing up what they have been doing in the past. Look at what happened during the fuel subsidy saga, those who sponsored the protests are those who benefitted from the subsidy by impoverishing Nigerians.
Goodluck said if we remove this cartel, then Nigerians will be better off. These same people made sure that our refineries don’t work. They funded those lies as long as they could. Where I come from in Buguma, we have always bought fuel for N150 per litre. This is even when the world knows that fuel in Nigeria is N97, we buy at N150. There are NNPC flow stations as you drive along
the belt of the Niger Delta but you will wonder what is happening. This cartel is the one sponsoring BokoHaram and all the insurgencies in this country. As a mother, if you take my child for one hour, I will cry and shout to the extent that you that took the child will drop the child. There is some mystery around theseChibok girls kidnap that must be unraveled. When this whole thing started, I had said that the Borno State governor and the director of SSS in Borno State should have been arrested. Let them come and explained to Nigerians what happened to those girls.
I have worked with a government before and I know that whatever happens in the state is first reported to the chief security officer of that state who is the governor. Let us stop playing politics with everything. Party versus party is politics but development versus development is not politics. Look at the rot in the power sector. It is as if nothing is happening there but Goodluck has
done so much. So much is happening because those of us who travelled have seen it. I traveled from Cross River to Ondo State, the road was so bad but today it is so smooth. You can sleep on the steering while driving. These roads were not motorable before this time. I will give Goodluck my vote again for what he has done so far in Nigeria. But if he finds a minister who is not doing well, he should not waste time in firing the person.
You were involved in amnesty and the programme will officially come to an end next year, do you have the fear that these boys may go back to the creeks?
If not properly wrapped up, we may have a new set of people who may not be happy. But I do not see any big boy going back to the creeks. People have gone through all kinds of peace training and they have done actual training. There is no need for anybody to return to the creek. For me, it is very important that Goodluck Jonathan should not grant any amnesty to Boko Haram. If he does that, it will become a tradition in Nigeria. I don’t even believe that these Boko Haram people are Nigerians. They are foreigners. Nigerians love life so much and will not want to kill anybody and will not want to be killed.
Do you support the extension of amnesty?
I will not support anything that will encourage violence but the process that will empower people not just in the Niger Delta but throughout Nigeria. President Goodluck Jonathan should stop anything that gives rise to violence. Young people need to be re-orientated. They need to be disarmed and empowered. We need to love other people and we need to love ourselves.
As an Ijaw woman, do you support an Ijaw governor in Rivers State in the 2015 election?
We have riverine people in all the three senatorial districts. In the three senatorial districts that we have, one has Kalabari and Ndoni, which is upland. The second one is Okrika and Ikwerre, which is upland. The third one has Bonny and the other one which is upland. First, an Ndoni man which is Odili from the upland was a governor, the second one which is Ikwerre also an upland produced Celestine Omehia and Rotimi Amaechi. If we are going by the same thing we also have riverine and upland. This quota system has encouraged the highest level of mediocrity in Nigeria. It is the major reason Nigeria is not concentrating on expertise. Choice should be based on quality of the person. When the campaigns start, we have to ask for manifestoes. Look at Rivers State everything is done half way out without completion. Amaechi said he was going to build about 300 schools, but he has not even built a quarter of that number. The schools look beautiful from the
outside but enter inside and see what is happening there. He said he was going to build health centres in all the local government areas, go there now there are no facilities, what is all that. See the roads.
They said they were going to do zero potholes and now they have not done anything about it. See monorail. It has attracted so much reactions. That monorail will never be completed by this regime. I was an SA when Amaechi was the speaker of the House of Assembly. I had so much respect for him. But now I think that he has not done what we expected of him. The road to my mother’s house can cause waist pain.
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