Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Information and Culture posted a statement to Twitter, announcing that the country’s Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ACRON) has issued a formal ban of using foreign models and voice-over actors in Nigerian media.
The move is a major step for the country that appears to want to take back the narrative of representation in the country’s native population. In an interview with the Times, the president of the Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria, Steve Babaeko said, “10 to 20 years ago if you checked the commercials, I would say they were almost 50/50 in terms of foreign faces and all the voice-overs were British accents.” Babaeko notes that in the past few years, Nigeria appears to have gone through a ‘kind of renaissance’ where he noticed that its people have found a ‘new sense of pride merging’ within the younger population.
With the new ban, many are seeing that the country is finally catching up with national sentiment. The ban takes effect on 1st October 2022, in hopes that it will be the first step towards allowing African history and stories to be told by its people. If companies choose to disobey the ban, they would be required to pay a tariff for every foreign model used in an advertisement.