CORA Art Stampede 2025: Why Prof. Segun Ojewuyi Says It’s Time to Scrap Nigeria’s Culture Ministry
By Jerry Adesewo
The 2025 CORA Arts Stampede at Freedom Park, Lagos, was expected to close the Lagos Book and Art Festival on a reflective note, on Sunday November 16, 2025. Instead, it ignited one of the most provocative cultural debates in recent years. At the centre of it all stood Professor Segun Ojewuyi of the University of Illinois, whose radically uncompromising position shook the room and set the rhythm for a conversation that refused to remain polite.
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Ojewuyi, a former Secretary General of the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP) did not mince words. In his view, Nigeria’s Ministry of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy has outlived its usefulness and now exists only as a drain on resources that should be strengthening the creative sector. He argued that the bureaucracy has grown into an expensive machine that consumes far more than it contributes, leaving artists to fend for themselves while the ministry maintains structures that achieve little or nothing. With an air of calm certainty, he declared that the entire ministry should be scrapped, its officials retired or relieved of duty, and its recurrent expenditure redirected into a culture endowment fund that would actually support the people doing the work.
He illustrated his point by drawing attention to the enormous funds spent annually on salaries, allowances, official vehicles, maintenance, travel and the endless administrative bill that keeps the ministry running. In his estimation, if this money were pooled into a dedicated endowment and left untouched for a few years, the interest alone could provide meaningful support for artists across the country. For him, the ministry has become a monument to inefficiency, sustained not because it serves culture but because it serves those administratively connected to it.
Ojewuyi’s frustration was not theoretical. He linked the decline of the National Troupe of Nigeria to its absorption into the civil service, arguing that an ensemble meant for artistic excellence cannot thrive under a system where performers wait for retirement rather than maintain peak creative output. He dismissed the annual National Festival of Arts and Culture as little more than a contract-awarding platform that has contributed nothing to the structural development of Nigerian arts. He lamented that every significant cultural policy the country has attempted to create has ended its journey on the desks of bureaucrats who have no incentive to implement them.
For him, the issue was not lack of ideas or lack of policy frameworks. Nigeria is rich with both. The problem, he insisted, is execution. Policies die in the civil service because the machinery responsible for carrying them out is fundamentally misaligned with the needs of artists. Instead of serving as an engine for cultural growth, the ministry functions as a holding pen for routine administrators whose priorities rarely align with the dynamism and urgency of creative work.
At the core of Ojewuyi’s argument was a simple but blunt belief: Nigeria’s creative economy is being held back not by scarcity but by mismanagement. Artists generate culture, mount festivals, stage performances, build platforms and feed the country’s global image. Government, he said, remains the absentee parent—visible only in speeches and largely absent where it matters. Yet the artists continue to create, innovate and push boundaries, relying on sheer willpower in the absence of institutional support.
This distance between the ministry and the lived reality of artists was, for him, reason enough to call for a hard reset. He acknowledged that his views might anger some, even disappoint others, but insisted that the country cannot continue doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. The Ministry of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy, he repeated, has not worked. The system is broken. It is time to end it and begin again.
Ojewuyi did not romanticise the idea of collapse. His point was that the creative sector is already dying slowly under the weight of bureaucracy, and that controlled demolition may be the only path to rebuilding something functional. In his vision, a new structure—leaner, more accountable, driven by working artists—could emerge once the old one is cleared away.
Whether or not Nigeria will scrap its culture ministry remains to be seen, but after Ojewuyi’s intervention, one truth became impossible to ignore: the demand for a new cultural paradigm in Nigeria can no longer be postponed or politely deferred.