Where possible I never repost articles I have seen elsewhere. On occasions I slice and dice. But considering this one is an article about me and numerous people haven’t got access to FT. Here we go.
Reposted from the FT

Nollywood, Nigeria’s low-budget film industry, has left its mark across much of Africa, with copies of the movies on offer at markets throughout the continent. Most of these are illegal copies, however, meaning most Nigerian film-makers derive little financial benefit from their international popularity.
Yet the internet is beginning to change that, says Jason Njoku, a London-born web entrepreneur who has attracted a worldwide monthly audience of more than 1m to his Nollywood streaming service.
“The demand has been insatiable,” Mr Njoku says. His company, Iroko Partners, is racing to keep up: it has bought the online distribution rights to 1,600 films since November last year.

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Wired have an awesome article on internet and wealth creation in Africa. Preaching to the converted. I have been totally bullish on Africa for the last 2 years.

While the Rest of the World (RoW) ceases to grow and governments grapple with decades of decadence. So perfectly illustrated by the recent global ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests.

Africa hums along.

Yes Nigeria definitely has its issues. I will write about a fair number of them over the next few weeks and years. But a million dollars isn’t cool on more. A billion is.

African needs an internet billionaire. Fast. Nothing like obscene riches to galvanize and inspire the masses. Reminds me of a Businessweek article Can Greed Save Africa?

If you want to become extremely wealthy over the next five years, and you have a basic grasp of technology, here’s a no-brainer: move to Africa.

Seriously. The internet is only now arriving, and — with a billion people on the continent still mostly offline — there exists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build the next Zyngas, eBays and Groupons for a huge untapped local market. You need only look at the map of huge broadband fibreoptic cables currently being laid on both east and west coasts, from Djibouti to Dakar, to understand how quickly and ambitiously an entire continent is being connected. It’s like being back in 1995 again, and realising there might just be a market for an online bookshop or auction website.

Don’t take my word for it: David Cameron is so keen to give British entrepreneurs a foothold that he recently took a high-level delegation of corporate CEOs to Nigeria and South Africa to highlight “one of the greatest economic opportunities on the planet”. The trip — featuring the bosses of firms such as Barclays and Bombardier, Vodafone and Virgin Atlantic — was hailed by Downing Street as “a historic visit to a continent with a trillion dollar economy and the potential, according to the IMF, to grow faster than Brazil over the next five years”. Much of that growth will come from startups that bring the mobile internet to businesses and consumers who have until now been offline. That’s why Cameron’s team invited along the British founders of red-hot mobile-money business Monitise, a clever text-messaging system called FrontlineSMS — and your own Digital Life columnist with his trusty notebook.

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In November 2010 I moved out to Lagos, Nigeria to scale and accelerate my start-up independent movie distribution firm, Iroko Partners. At first most folk assumed I was a.) Crazy, or b.) Stupid; although the jury is still out on which, one thing is clear,

I most definitely under-estimated, yet now appreciate that creating and conducting business in Nigeria is no joke.

And more importantly is definitely not cheap.

Lagos’s lack of infrastructure and horrendous starting-up costs can nightmare any start-up dreams. After-all by their very nature start-ups are cash starved little things always one crisis away from disaster and /or death.

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