African Movie Industry: How Far Have We Come?

The era when we could not hold more than 2 African movies in our hands owing to the fact that our movies were stored on huge cassettes have ended unnoticed.
Slowly, we have left behind those big boxes of tapes for VCDs/DVDs, making transportation, collection, storage and sharing of African movies easy and affordable.
The mentioned change has positively affected packaging, storage and sharing, thereby increasing patronize of African movies all around the world, especially those areas you can find communities of Africans.
Despite the above effort to attract more and more interest, there is still a gigantic obstacle curtailing this effort and that is; the level of acting remains tremendously poor, making patronization to increase at a decreasing rate.
It would not be unfair, disproportionate or disrespectful to say that, collectively, there have not been a single progress or improvement in the way and manner scripts are being interpreted by African actors.
With a lot being pushed into production (usage of modern Hi-tech equipments), creativity and packaging, it is only reasonably that we expect a corresponding improvement in the level of acting. Shockingly, most African movie actors and actresses are still flying high on the mediocre radar
Ironically, countless award schemes are being organized day in and out to reward these non-improving actors and actresses. I sometimes ask…why don’t we organize acting training workshops and seminars for these actors if we indeed want to reward them? Their sub-standard acting needs that instead of the countless plaques we hand over to them.
Probably, in the minds of these actors, they are the best but on screens, they remain unimpressive and forever boring. If indeed, we want to see a substantial growth of the African movie industry, we must look beyond technological improvement and consider human development.
The journey has been long, our struggle to gain international recognition and acceptance continues. But until we re-evaluate our actors, mode of recruitment and industrial training structures, the improvement in production and technology will continue, except that it will have a highly infinitesimal effect on the over all attractiveness of the African Movie Industry.
The African movie industry has travelled a long way in terms of time, but when it comes to the growth needed to match the fast developing world movie industry, it seems all we have achieved is the physics of time travel…Nothing in reality!
How far have we come? We seem to be standing on the same unmoving stone.