The Nigerian literary community has been engaged in an important conversation around piracy, unapproved digitization, accessibility, and distribution of Nigerian and African books. Fortune Amor’s digitization of over 200 African writers’ books belonging to the Heinemann African Writers Series sparked this timely conversation. Nigerian journalist and writer, Molara Wood, and others have rightfully called out Amor, citing piracy and copyright infringement. Another set of Nigerians, writers inclusive, are calling for grace, especially in a country where the minimum wage is N77,000. Then, there’s a third set of Nigerians who are indecisive and are sympathetic towards the argument of both parties. This conversation and its attendant comments recall my undergraduate days.
As an English Language student, there are multiple occasions when lecturers deny me access to classes and texts because I do not possess mandated texts. My meager, non-existent allowance meant there was no disposable income to purchase recommended texts. Rarely, when the allowance isn’t slim, and there’s a zeal to purchase these mostly old and out-of-print texts, accessibility becomes a challenge. Occasionally, lecturers lend out photocopied versions to eager students. This isn’t a unique experience but one that cuts across various universities and disciplines. Science students seek solace in pirated soft copies of expensive textbooks. Ditto law students.
The described context is for academic work. For leisure reads, some Nigerians often embrace pirate sites and digital communities where requests for pirated digital copies of old and contemporary Nigerian and African literature are granted by members. Despite this, there’s a parallel growth and increase in physical communities that encourage engagement with Nigerian and African literature and the purchase of legal copies. These two communities, supposedly unified in their love for African literature, have a measurable impact on the African ecosystem. They promote and “preserve” African literature; however, to what extent and degree they do these can be debated. The illegal promoters of African literature dispose of writers’ right to earn, investors, publishers, and booksellers to recoup ROI. The legal promoters of African literature make a case for continued investment in infrastructure and the book ecosystem. They reward writers for their laborious and lonely work. By buying books, they motivate writers and publishers to do more, thereby leading to sustainability in the ecosystem.
Writing is a life-long and meagerly financially rewarding profession that requires time, training, effort, and resources. A possessive profession, it absolves and distances its practitioners from social and often financially rewarding activities. A regimented life, writing, and the ever gnawing need to be great, compels writers to spend a lifetime learning how to perfect the sentence and paragraph. It compels writers to instinctively eavesdrop on conversations, hoping to get “inspired”. Thus, for the committed writer, writing is a financial and time-draining commitment. Despite this commitment towards developing their craft, writing remains deeply underappreciated. In 2014, a survey conducted by the UK-based Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) found that the median annual income of professional authors was £10,500, significantly below the national average income. This survey also highlighted that only a small fraction of authors—approximately 10%—earned a living solely from their writing.
In Nigeria, this figure will be significantly lower due to high production costs, a fragmented distribution network, poverty, and piracy. It isn’t rare for a Nigerian writer to be a communication specialist, marketing executive, lawyer, editor, researcher, academic and entrepreneur just for sustenance. Nigerian writers deserve to be compensated for their talent, but piracy and economic pressure make it impossible. Nigerian writers are publishing, but it’s hard to think of a contemporary Nigerian-based writer who earns exclusively from their writing. This signals a deep structural disconnect between Nigeria’s massive literary talent and its struggling economic infrastructure for the arts. Nigerian writing is globally recognized, but locally unsustainable. And piracy, on any scale, contributes to this.
There’s no rationalizing of piracy. It’s a punishable crime. But in Nigeria and its neighboring countries, where citizens are poor yet enthused about reading, what kind of accommodating conversation should we be having? The PiggyVest Savings Report of 2024 provides helpful highlights. The report shows that over 1 in 3 Nigerians earn less than ₦100,000 monthly, while 71% rely on a single income stream. 28% have no income, and food remains the primary expense for 83% of respondents, indicating widespread economic hardship. The survey indicated that N100,000 is the income bracket with the highest number of Nigerians. Nigerians basically fall into the low-income earners bracket. To Nigerians in this bracket, essential items are prioritized with the possibility of incurring monthly debts.
Nigerian writers suffer double the tragedy. Firstly, they are mostly Nigerians living with the economic and political complexities of being Nigerian. Like their primary readers, they also suffer from the rising inflation, frequent the same market as everyone else, and are at the mercy of heartless and blood-sucking agents and landlords. Secondly, they are Nigerian writers. Being a writer, published and non-published, in Nigeria is synonymous with penury. Days before the ongoing conversation, Nigerian writer, Elnathan John, of Born on a Tuesday fame, broke down how traditionally published writers earn. In the tweet, he stated that “for a $15 book, traditionally published, the bookstore makes around $7.50 (gross), the publisher, around $6.35 (gross), and the author around $1.15. That is 50% bookstore, 42% publisher, and 8% author. This is not in every case, of course. Sometimes, for the author, it can go up to 10% or 12%. So, if you buy one $15 book, the author gets less than $2. Maximum, $3. Unless they are self-published (which nobody in the literary industry respects).” This is another heartbreaking reality for the Nigerian author who hopes to publish internationally. How are they to earn a living from their intellectual property?
In an economic climate like ours, art and literature (film, music, books, and visual arts) and artists (writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians) suffer the most impact. Nigerians, unmindful of their affinity for art and literature, will pay for food before thinking of art. This isn’t about preference. Food is a basic need. And, as PiggyVest’s report shows, food, not housing or literature, consumes a significant portion of Nigerians’ earnings. For a country facing this structural and infrastructural deficit, what should the eager-to-read Nigerian do? Live and die unfulfilled for not reading? Run into the safety of ignorance since education (books in this context) is expensive? Seek alternative platforms and structures to read? Importantly, how should writers of similar fate earn a living?
The recent conversation about piracy, copyright infringement, accessibility, reading culture, and poverty has made it important to rethink how we approach these conversations. The often-repeated and popular “if-education-is-expensive-try-ignorance” phrase absolves the Nigerian and African governments of their failure in fulfilling one of their core responsibilities: educating their citizens. That Nigerians are poor and won’t necessarily, unmindful of their affinity for literature, purchase books has been established. That poverty affects genuine readers and passionate writers in Nigeria is a given. But what about Nigerian readers who have been frustrated out of their passion for books courtesy of economic hardship? Thus, while many Nigerians are supposedly dispassionate and uninterested in paying for books legally, there exists a parallel market of passionate and interested readers who can’t afford them.
Nigerians have developed a condescension towards art. Recently, veteran Nigerian director and filmmaker, Tunde Kelani called out a platform for pirating and distributing his works on social media. The pirate was cutting titles like Saworoide, Agogo Eewo, Ti Oluwa Nile, and Thunderbolt (Magun) into unauthorized reels and posting them online despite the availability of these titles on YouTube. Kelani fittingly described this as “the destruction of our cultural work. A film is a complete story, not fragments for quick views to make quick money illegally. This is stealing openly.” The same sentiment can be applied to the ongoing conversation around piracy and copyright infringements. Intellectual property (IP) laws in Nigeria are often outdated, creating a gap between legal protections and practical enforcement for creators. While the Copyright Act of 2022 exists, a cultural tendency to defend infringers as underdogs frequently undermines the protection of IP rights. Artists attempting to enforce their rights, as had been observed so far, often face social backlash, being labeled “selfish” or “elitist” for challenging infringement. This social dynamic, coupled with the high cost of litigation, forces many writers and creators to suffer in silence rather than pursue legal justice. Consequently, these factors stifle innovation and leave Nigerian writers vulnerable to ongoing and unchecked exploitation. Culture Custodian, in its article interrogating the tension between IP protection and social expectations, argues that if Nigerians are going to address piracy and copyright infringement effectively, a balance between upholding legal rights and acknowledging the socio-cultural beliefs that shape our creative industry must be struck. A need for a better understanding of intellectual property as a tool for economic empowerment, not as a barrier to creativity or collaboration, was suggested. “Creatives must see IP rights not as a divisive force but as insurance, that all members of the industry can benefit fairly from their work. Is the spirit of collaboration and mutual support essential? Of course, but not at the expense of intellectual property protection. If Nigerians can create an environment where both social solidarity and IP rights are respected, our creative industries can continue to innovate and thrive, both locally and internationally.”
The Nigerian government is complicit. For decades, successive Nigerian governments have failed to prioritize education. When Nigeria unveiled its 2026 budget, ₦3.52 trillion was allocated to the education sector, representing approximately 6.1% of the total ₦58.18 trillion proposed expenditure. The same budget allocated ₦15.52 trillion for debt servicing, representing approximately 27% of the total proposed ₦58.18 trillion expenditure. That Nigerians aren’t this government’s priority isn’t news. Thus, if education keeps getting underfunded, the absence of well-stocked universities and public libraries, and limited funding for educational and research initiatives, it’s of limited importance to the government. And it’s Nigerians, writers, readers, publishers, and the ecosystem that suffer.
In Tomide Marv and Dolapo Amusat’s essay about Afrobeats’ struggle to find stability at home, they diagnosed a problem. Their analysis can be applied to Nollywood, the Nigerian book community, and other artistic fields and industries. “The biggest hindrance to the growth and sustainability of the music industry is caused by macroeconomic factors that seemingly have little or nothing to do with it. Issues like persistent poverty, unprecedented inflation, a precarious business environment, and a lack of adequate government support for creative industry initiatives are some of the key blockers to the industry’s success.”
Western digitisation of African archives often masks digital colonialism under the guise of universal access. These projects are framed as altruistic rescue missions; the processed archive is typically hosted on Western platforms, leaving source communities without the high-speed internet or expensive subscriptions needed to access their own heritage. This creates a predatory cycle where scholarly journals paywall African intellectual labor, effectively selling it back to the very researchers who produced it. Furthermore, by monetizing these books and cultural objects, Western institutions are claiming legal ownership of the digital archive. As the physical archives and copies in Nigeria and Africa keep deteriorating and fizzling out of existence, their digital counterparts flourish abroad.
More recently, this extraction has evolved into data colonialism, where digitised African literature is used to train Artificial Intelligence models. Western tech companies profit from the linguistic and cultural nuances extracted from these archives, yet the original creators themselves receive zero royalties or financial returns. Ultimately, these practices prioritise Western academic and commercial gain over the sovereignty and economic empowerment of African custodians.
This is why it’s a moral and political responsibility of writers, readers, publishers, investors, and everyday Nigerians to demand better governmental efforts and an alternative to the blood-sucking one that currently exists. The Nigerian ruling class is happy and encourages the ruin because an uneducated, docile, and unenlightened mass won’t challenge or threaten its rule. In a working system, this moral and political burden isn’t one writers, readers, and publishers have to bear. Additionally, in a functional system, the government will provide guardrails that reduce piracy and incentivize knowledge production.
The Nigerian Publishers Association (NPA) describes piracy not as “a nuisance but as a parallel supply chain.” This designation is problematic because piracy is criminal. NPA frowns against the circulation of illegal copies of books while calling for tighter enforcement and coordinated action by the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC), Customs, and Police. The association, in its report, suggested what a sustainable model might look like for writers, readers, publishers, and book sellers. They suggested partnering with libraries, enforcing copyright laws, offering affordable pricing packages for students and academics, strengthening distribution and more. As we move, the conversation should tilt towards ways to make these systems exist.
Culture Custodian’s “The Ethics of Piracy” which explores the topic in the context of Chimamanda Adichie’s Dream Count, provides useful insights on how to hold forward-thinking conversations around piracy in Nigeria. The article emphatically condemned it but was conscious of Nigeria’s sordid economic situation. “We need more government effort in bridging the literary divide through book subsidies and other initiatives of this stripe. Private individuals with means can also step up with charitable initiatives aimed at increasing the affordability of books. The alternative to this is a further fractured society where millions are automatically excluded from the joys of reading on account of their diminished purchasing power.” The Nigerian law on copyright infringement doesn’t accommodate nuance. The law is clear: piracy, of any kind, either for academic and leisure purposes, is criminal. And there can be no justification for criminal acts. But in public literary conversation, should nuance be accommodated? That Nigerians can’t come to a consensus on the criminality, immorality, and illegality of piracy is a testament to our eroding values. Demanding knowledge democratization is legitimate, but it shouldn’t drown out the valid concerns of writers, publishers or come at their expense, and culture custodians about the need to combat piracy. But until a legal and sustainable model for Nigerian readers exists, what happens?
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