The Minister of Art, Culture and Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, has pledged to protect the intellectual properties of actors and other players in the country’s creative economy and the minister targets $100bn contribution to the GDP by 2030.
Musawa said the ministry will launch the Intellectual Property policy for the creative economy next week, which is part of the mission to protect and drive the accomplishment of the $100bn GDP contribution of the sector.
The minister disclosed this on Monday at a stakeholder engagement forum on National Intellectual Property policy and strategy in Abuja.
The Intellectual Property policy was first drafted in 2022 and was reviewed to address stakeholder concerns.
She therefore said, “I have promised my creative community that I’m together with my sister going to deliver IP within the next couple of weeks and I was just looking at my calendar earlier on and I think I have less than a week to do so.
“I have a deadline that I need you to help me deliver, and I think it’s very important because for us at the Ministry of Art, Culture and Creative Economy everything is down to IP. It is the foundation. There’s nothing you can talk about in terms of closing up the gaps, the lacunas, trying to bring back the value if you do not have intellectual property.”
“We have within the next week a very robust and fortified intellectual property policy that will not only stand the test of time but will be presentable globally to investors that we have the kind of security that they would want to come to invest in several sectors within the Nigeria strata.”
The minister said the protection of intellectual property is essential for empowering Nigeria’s creators, safeguarding cultural heritage, and driving innovation across all sectors.
She said, “Ideas are not just the currency of progress, they are the heart of our future. The protection of these ideas that we have in every single stratum but for me within the creative space and more importantly the acknowledgment of the significance of ideas of our development is thus very paramount.
“So we want to look at the value that is created abroad and see how we can bring that value back home and the first step in doing that is having IP protection. In my ministry, we have committed that we want to have a great expansion economically whereby we will contribute at least 100 billion dollars to increase the GDP by 2030 and the first step in giving us the ability to do that is to have IP and also at the same time we want to look at all the value that Nigerian creatives for music, film, art and fashion and our culinary as well because now wherever you go in the world people want to eat Nigerian food and that’s a great thing.”