Award-winning poet Servio Gbadamosi has revealed some difficulties Nigerian publishers face.
During an exclusive interview with Rudolf Okonkwo on 90MinutesAfrica, the founder of Noirledge Publishing said that publishers and authors struggle to sell even 2000 copies of their works in the country.
“This is a country of over 200 million people in which publishers struggle to sell 2000 copies of their books,” the poet said. “The number of active readers who have the purchasing power to afford the works that these authors and publishers produce is very small.”
The Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Poetry winner attributed the decline in book purchases to the increasing inflation and high cost of living faced by Nigerians in recent times. He said even the small number of Nigerians who can still afford the books is further shrinking as the economic situation worsens, thus destroying the “ecosystem that can encourage a thriving publishing industry in this country.”
Reacting to the criticism by some literary analysts on the structure of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Prize for Literature, Mr. Gbadamosi, whose two of his published authors have won the prestigious prize, said the prize had been a lifeline for some of the fortunate winners in the system lacking the necessary ecosystem for literary works to flourish. He argued that, rather than trying to discredit the efforts of the NLNG, other institutions in the country with similar capacity could set up their own prizes to correct any of the perceived shortcomings in the NLNG Prize. “With over 200 million people, Nigeria should not be looking to only one or two prizes. We need more of them at different levels,” Gbadamosi reiterated.
The author of the collection of poems “Where the Light Enters You” also frowned at the way some poorly written books get approval to be in the curriculum of Nigerian schools. He said that some children who read these poor-quality books may end up with “deformed minds.”
“The children reading some of those books are going to have deformed minds because they are badly written, poorly edited, and of low-quality production,” he said. “You can even tell that some of the writers don’t have a grasp of the language with which they are writing. These are the kind of books that the regulators always find a way to get into the curriculum.”
The writer explained that, oftentimes, those who are saddled with assessing and approving books for our schools don’t care about the development of the children who will read the books, but only see it as an avenue to make money for themselves.
“There are stipulated standards for vetting these books, but sometimes the people in charge will skip them and grant approval because of personal benefits.
“At the end, it’s the children that suffer for it, especially those that don’t have parents with the dedication to look at what their children are being taught and try to correct the anomalies in some of the texts,” Mr. Gbadamosi noted.
Speaking further on the industry’s challenges, the writer also decried the state of many university libraries in the country, describing them as “graveyards of books” as most of the books they keep are over 40 years old. He said the primary reason for the parlous state of the libraries is that the universities don’t get votes for restocking books in the libraries.
