A crackdown announced in an interview, not a gazette
On 14 July 2026, Ghana's National Film Authority signalled it would move against television stations broadcasting Nigerian films without rights. The specifics are worth reading closely, because they are thinner than the headline. As reported by Pulse Ghana, Deputy NFA CEO James Gardiner — responding to Nollywood producer Uchenna Mbunabo, who had accused Ghanaian stations of "stealing our films and showing them for free with impunity" — described financial penalties for first-time offenders, with the money routed to compensate producers, plus licence suspension and revocation for repeat violators. The mechanism would arrive through a new regulatory framework being built with the Ministry of Communications, the National Communications Authority and the National Media Commission.
That is a plan to build a plan. There is no gazetted instrument, no commencement date, no published schedule of penalties, no named stations. Read it as intent and the intent looks credible. Read it as enforcement and you will be waiting a while.
What lifts it above noise is the company it keeps. Ghana has been assembling anti-piracy machinery for months: at the end of December 2025 the NCA announced a multi-agency offensive against illegal streaming of pay-TV content, run through a stakeholder committee chaired by the Communications Minister and working alongside the Cybersecurity Authority and MultiChoice Ghana. That effort, as MyJoyOnline reported at the time, framed piracy as a revenue and national-security problem rather than a creative grievance. The film angle is a second front on an existing campaign — which is why it deserves attention, and also why the pattern of the first front should temper expectations.
Piracy is a tax, and West African screen pays it at source
Strip the moral language away and piracy behaves like a tax. It is levied on every unit of value the industry creates, collected by someone other than the creator, and it falls heaviest exactly where formal distribution is weakest. The rate is not trivial. The Nigerian Copyright Commission's 2022 assessment put Nigeria's annual losses to digital piracy across film, music, sport and broadcast at over ₦150 billion, affecting close to 80% of films produced. Treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement — loss estimates in this sector are modelled, dated, and range from roughly $1bn to $2bn a year depending on who is counting and what they assume a pirated view would otherwise have been worth. The direction is unambiguous even where the decimal places are not.
This is the same value-capture problem MonoKromatik tracks in music, where African catalogue is consumed globally but monetised through rights structures owned elsewhere, and in fashion, where African silhouettes scale as trend while the originating studios stay small. Screen is the cleanest version of it, because the good is a file. Nollywood produces at genuinely global volume and exports culture at a rate few industries anywhere can match. The leak is not in the making. It is at the point where attention converts to money — and that point is currently controlled by whoever can rebroadcast a YouTube upload fastest.
Ghana is not trying to make a law. It has one.
Gardiner's framing was that officials "are trying to make laws." Ghana already has one. The Copyright Act, 2005 — Act 690 — was enacted on 17 May 2005, replacing PNDCL 110, and it covers exactly this: the unauthorised broadcast of a protected work.
That distinction decides what this announcement is worth. A legislative gap would take a bill, a committee, a gazette and a parliamentary calendar. An enforcement gap takes a prosecutor. Twenty-one years after Act 690 passed, we could find no record of a single prosecution brought under it for unauthorised film broadcast — in either direction, which is its own answer.
So when the announcement promises new law, it is promising the slower and more visible of the two available routes, and skipping the one that is already available and has never been used.
There is also a jurisdictional problem nobody has addressed. Broadcast licensing in Ghana sits with the National Communications Authority and the National Media Commission. The National Film Authority, whose deputy chief executive made the promise, is not the licensing body. Gardiner is undertaking action his agency may not have the power to take.
Why enforcement has always failed here
Gardiner named the reason himself, which is more candour than these announcements usually carry: "There are copyright laws, but they are not effective because a lot of the TV stations don't have offices." Many operate digitally, some from outside the country. A regulator cannot revoke a licence held by nobody, at an address that does not exist, in a jurisdiction it does not reach.
The wider pattern is worse. Ghana's Copyright Office has warned broadcasters before. Nigeria has banned platforms and watched them return — Moviebox.ng was blocked and resurfaced under fresh links within hours. Takedown is cheap for the regulator and cheaper for the pirate. And there is a structural asymmetry nobody names: the aggrieved party here is Nigerian, the broadcaster is Ghanaian, and the enforcing agency answers to a Ghanaian political constituency in which Nollywood producers have no vote. Cross-border rights need reciprocity, not goodwill.
Streaming raised the ceiling and the incentive at the same time
Between roughly 2020 and 2024, global platforms bid up West African screen IP and, for the first time, put a real price on a Nigerian film. Then the bid collapsed. Netflix paused commissioning original Nigerian productions while continuing to license existing titles; Prime Video downsized its Africa operations. The director Jay Jituboh's account of why, reported by Premium Times, is the whole thesis in one line: Netflix had fewer than 200,000 subscribers in a country of 200 million, and "every show on Netflix has been pirated."
That is the trap stated plainly. Streaming did not create piracy; it made piracy legible. Platforms proved the audience existed at continental scale, then discovered that the pirate and the platform were serving the same viewers — and only one of them was charging. Global streamers priced for a market that could not pay and were surprised when it did not. Piracy was the demand curve they refused to read.
Showmax read it. By November 2023 it held roughly 2.1 million subscribers and about 39% of the African market against Netflix's 1.8 million and 33.5%, and it then cut subscription fees by nearly half in 2024 to buy volume. Price is not a marketing decision in this market. Price is anti-piracy policy.
What actually fixes it
Enforcement is one lever of three, and on its own it is the weakest. Distribution is the first: Nollywood's pivot to cinema and to YouTube as a monetised primary window works precisely because it meets the audience where piracy already found it. Pricing is the second, and Showmax has run the experiment. Enforcement is the third — and it earns its place only when aimed at a target with something to lose.
Which is the genuinely interesting thing about Ghana's proposal. A licensed television station is not an anonymous mirror site. It has a frequency, a signal, advertisers, and a licence that a regulator can actually take. That is a chokepoint, and chokepoints are where enforcement works. If the NFA framework does one thing well, it should be narrow: make a broadcast licence contingent on demonstrable rights clearance, and make the penalty flow to the producer rather than the treasury — which is, to its credit, what Gardiner described.
The test is not whether Ghana announces this. It has announced it. The test is whether a single station loses a licence, and whether a single Nigerian producer is paid. Until then, the tax stands.
A number nobody has
The figures in circulation for African screen piracy losses span three orders of magnitude: ₦150bn a year from the Nigerian Copyright Commission in 2022 with no published method; US$2bn and US$1bn from industry sources with no method; ₦7.5bn — about US$46m — from BusinessDay in 2015; "up to 50 per cent of profits" from Nollywood insiders quoted by CNN in 2009. For Ghana specifically, "hundreds of millions of cedis," unsourced.
We are not going to pick one. A spread that wide is not a measurement problem, it is the absence of measurement, and the absence is the more useful fact: an industry that cannot size its own losses cannot cost an enforcement programme, cannot make a budget case for one, and cannot tell afterwards whether it worked.
One enforcement effort in the region did publish results. The Nigerian Copyright Commission reported that its 2011 drive produced 26 raids, 145 arrests, more than six million works seized with a street value of US$4.6m, 39 prosecutions and 19 convictions, followed by the destruction of 722 million pirated works covering 2007–2011. Worth noting that this is the enforcing agency reporting on itself, and that it is fifteen years old. It remains the only measured comparator we could find.
