10th April, 2015
Funsho Arogundade
In the morning of Monday, 6 April, award-winning filmmaker, Kunle Afolayan took to his Twitter account to voice out his frustration over the pirating of his films.
He accused Igbo of being behind the intellectual property theft.
“It is a fact that most of the pirates I see selling pirated CDs and DVDs are Igbo. One even threatened me after I seized some pirated copies of my film from him. Why, why, why?” Afolayan had tweeted.
But Afolayan’s outburst came on a wrong day: It was the same day Lagos monarch, Rilwan Akiolu’s ethnic barb was trending. And then came the torrent of attacks from his colleagues of Igbo extraction including Uche Jombo, Charles Novia and Ifeanyi Ikpoenyi, who ignored the message but read xenophobic meaning to his complaints.
This forced Afolayan to later apologise, blaming his outburst on frustration.
“I am really sorry if my Igbo fans and friends feel offended. I am just so bitter and pained. I am truly sorry,” he tweeted.
According to him, may be the timing was wrong and he was honestly unaware of Oba’s raging comments.
“You can tell from my works that I am one of the non-tribalistic people in the industry. I was not aware of the Oba’s comments, but was only bitter at the time of sending those tweets,” he said.
The filmmaker also revealed that he is aware that pirates already have his multi-award winning film October 1 and they are threatening to release it into the market even though he is still screening the movie at cinemas.
“My distributor is Igbo. I like and trust him but he mentions his frustration all the time. His kinsmen are on his tail. We are all frustrated. You want to know, Ok, the pirates already have October 1 and have been threatening the distributors that they will release it this week,” he said.