Nigeria halts film village plans after Muslim clerics' protest

Nigeria has shelved a plan to build a USD 10 million film village outside the mainly Muslim northern city of Kano, bowing to virulent opposition from radical Muslim clerics.
The decision deals a blow to a booming industry, developers said, as the centre was to generate thousands more jobs in a city hit with staggering unemployment.
Abdurrahman Kawu Sumaila, an adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, said the cancellation answered the wishes of the local population.
"The people have had their say and the government has heeded them," he told reporters last week after months of discord.
The project, to be built on a 20-hectare (nearly 50-acre) expanse near Kano, planned for a film center, a 400-capacity auditorium, a hostel, a sound stage, a restaurant, a three-star

hotel, a shopping mall, a stadium and a clinic.

Salafist clerics blasted it in Friday sermons, saying it would promote immorality and undermine Islamic values.
"We don't want it, we don't need it, they should take it somewhere. We will continue to curse the people behind this film village," said Abdullahi Usman Gadon-Kaya, who spearheaded the protest.
Joined by critics on local radio and the social media,they drowned out those in favour of the film village.
Danjuma Wurim Dadu of the Nigerian Film Corporation had told a film conference in Kano that more than USD 3 million had been set aside for the centre, which he said was to create 10,000 jobs.

It aimed to boost the massively popular local film industry known as "Kannywood", which, according to the national
film censors agency, accounts for 38 per cent of film production in Nigeria -- a country that already turns out the second highest number of films per year worldwide after India's
Bollywood.
"This is a missed opportunity to provide much-needed jobs for the teeming unemployed youth, who have turned to drugs for solace", local film analyst Mudan Saidu told AFP.
Nigeria is well known for its "Nollywood" video production which churns out about 200 films a month in the country's educated and urban south. Shot in English as well as the local Yoruba and Igbo languages, they are popular throughout west Africa.

The northern Kannywood has huge appeal among the 60 million Hausa speakers, a language widely spoken across west Africa.
But Muslim clerics have kept close watch on Kannywood, accusing it of promoting un-Islamic foreign values by imitating American Hollywood and Indian Bollywood movies, a charge film makers have denied.