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1. The Nigerian nation, a nation desperate for jobs, today has no coordinated arrangements, no development policy and no financing scheme to exploit for national development, the huge talents of our young people and the massive potentials of the entertainment industry, an industry that provides Nigeria with the most veritable platforms to harness the latent talent, energy and skills of hundreds of thousands of our young people who roam the streets everyday with no hope of any real employment except in the devil’s workshop. 2. While artistes are dying out of despair and extreme hardship, individuals who neither created any work nor made any investment are feeding fat and living large. 3. The amount of piracy and other forms of intellectual property infringement in Nigeria have become intolerable and whatever efforts made so far to deal with them have failed and rather than piracy being controlled or reduced in Nigeria, it is now ravaging an entire generation of creative people and further destroying our nation’s image. 4. While the average cost of a music CD around the world is about 8 USD, because of the debilitating piracy, dealers in Nigeria are now forced to sell a full music CD loaded with several songs created over months of hard work and financed with millions of Naira for as low as 30 cents! 5. All the foreign investors in our industry have long deserted the country, taking away with them millions in investment and thousands of jobs. 6. Consumed by their fixation on the free money that comes from oil, our leaders have completely abandoned us and are too ‘busy’ to pay even the smallest attention to the development of the ingenuity and creative talents of the Nigerian youth, the true wealth of any real nation. 7. With the deafening silence of the government, practitioners in the Nigerian entertainment industry are being tempted to take the laws into their hands in a desperate effort to safeguard the fruits of their creativity and this may soon result in otherwise avoidable bloodshed. 8. Our nation faces a real danger of international sanctions because of the glaring failure to meet her obligations under the different conventions signed by our country to protect intellectual property rights of citizens of other nations which are wantonly infringed upon in Nigeria alongside those of Nigerian nationals. 9. Despite all the long speeches and promises made by successive administrations, it has become clear that no one is treating the matter with the seriousness it deserves and that the authorities have simply continued to pay lip service to the plight of Nigerian artistes. 10. We have complained enough, agitated enough and if we must die under this treacherous situation, we have decided to let the whole world know that we will not die in silence.

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