Lukmon Oloyede.
The Africa Film Academy, organizers of the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) on Tuesday announced that Lagos, Nigeria will play host for the 12th edition of the award which will take place on 30th of April, 2016.
During a media parley held in Ikeja, founder of AMAA, Peace Anyiam-Osigwe, revealed that the 2015 AMAA held in South Africa was negatively impacted by delay in visa issuance by the host country.
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“One of the reasons for this (hosting this year’s event in Lagos) is because South Africa has laws that are not utterly friendly when it comes to the issuing of visas for other African countries. One of our greatest disappointments last year in AMAA was the fact that countries like Cameroun, Cape-Verde, Mauritian, Ethiopian struggled to get their visa to come into South Africa. Ghana got their visa on the day of AMAA by 6pm”, Anyiam-Osigwe said. “We don’t want a situation where our nominees from across Africa and beyond wouldn’t be able to attend AMAA”.
She stated the nominations of the 2016 AMAA will hold in Dubai from 17th to 20th March, 2016 in conjunction with African Cinema Business Roundtable (ABR) were discussions will focus on Africa as the new frontier for creative investment. We are going to Dubai to show investors that Africa is the new frontier for investment.
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“We are taking the conference and nominations to Dubai because a lot of venture capitalist uses Dubai as their base. Nigeria generated a revenue of over $3.2 million 2010 to 2014 (in the creative industry). We need to continue to build on that by promoting Africa creative works to the rest of the world”, she said.
Commenting on the choice of Lagos for this year event, she explained that “We don’t want to face that problem of having an AMAA event and our nominees are not there. We are very friendly and accommodating in Nigeria. For us to get visa, we had to go through the South African president. We lost a lot of money to airlines because we always fly all our nominees.
“On AMAA’s achievement over the years, she said it had sponsored over 15,000 flights for Nigerians to expose them to the film circles around the world, “because we believe the more they go out, the more they learn, network and more wealth comes to our African cinemas.”
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