Nigeria's fuel subsidy in documentary

Fuelling Poverty, the 30-minute documentary depicting the massive street protests in 2012 over the removal of oil subsidies. The film, which features Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka and civil rights activists, explores the siphoning of billions of dollars from government officials to private companies. “Fuelling Poverty” was screened at the 20th New York African Film Festival this month and won the Best Documentary at the 2013 African Movie Academy Awards on April 20.


The documentary has been viewed more than 50,000 times on YouTube as of Tuesday.

The documentary can be seen online but is “prohibited from exhibition in Nigeria” according to officials from the National Film and Video Censors Board.

Why? Who wants her dirty underwear hanging outside the market square?

“We don’t have a government. It’s a whole big banana republic,” Emmanuel Tom Ekin, a barber, says in the film. “They’ve been telling us stories all the time, deceiving us. And right now, in our faces, they are still deceiving us.”

Nigeria’s film industry could get a boost next month if the film “Half of A Yellow Sun” is screened at the Cannes Film Festival.