Edem Victor: From Overcoming School Bullying As Teenager To Becoming Nigeria’s Skit Industry Go-to Guy

Since starting his journey in the skit industry in 2016, Victor has used his craft to create some of the best skits out of Nigeria. In 2022, three of his works were nominated in the first-ever Online Social Content Creator category at the 8th Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Award (AMVCA). He is now transitioning from being a cinematographer to a content creator.

This is the story of Edem Victor!

We’ve never met Victor in person, but we could paint a picture of him from our one-hour phone conversation. He’s an affable, modest and energetic young man from a humble background who tried his hands on several skills – from electrical to computer engineering and dumped his dream to study mass communication before finally finding his forte in cinematography. Victor held nothing back as he took us through his journey to becoming one of Nigeria’s leading online social content producers.

He didn’t have it so smooth growing up in a one-room apartment on Aina Ajobo Street in the Ogba area of Lagos where he lived with his family consisting of his parents and elder sister. Their single-room apartment was demarcated with a curtain to create two separate sections. His mom was a popular food vendor known as ‘Mama Chioma’ in the neighbourhood while his late dad worked as a security officer and then tried different jobs after quitting the security job before his death in 2016.

At 17, he suffered a setback in his academics when he was in SS2 at the Babs Fafunwa Millennium Grammar School in Ojodu, Lagos, and then he quit. 

“I was not mentally ready to see my classmates in Senior Secondary School 3 (SSS3) while in SSS2. So I said instead of spending another year, let me just go to Technical School. Someone in my area was working with the electricity distribution company. He also finished school and had advised my mom to enrol me for a one-year course at the technical school to learn elect-elect, and after that, he will fix me somewhere in his office as a staff,” Victor said.

Two weeks into his one-year course, Victor quit again.

“I didn’t stay more than probably two weeks. I went like twice. The first time it was to register. I wouldn’t want to say I left the school because of bullying, but I was targeted by a group of boys who were constantly trolling me and tapping my head because I had a bald head then,” he said. “They do that, and they laugh, so I just returned home and told my parents that I was not going back there again. To date, I never told them why I quit; I just cried and convinced them that I don’t feel good there, and they said okay.”

When Technical School didn’t work, Victor tried learning computer engineering at the Computer Village in Ikeja, adjudged West Africa’s largest market for information and computer technology products and accessories. 

“They didn’t teach me anything,” Victor said. “I went there daily for six months to sit like a receptionist and mark attendance.”

He found no excitement at Computer Village, and he became convinced that computer engineering was not his calling. And he walked away. That was the third time he would be quitting a career path.

“I was trying all these skills because my sister was in a higher institution and my parents could not send both of us at the same time. So I had to wait for her to complete her studies.”

Circa 2013, after quitting his training at Computer Village, Victor found a new fascination.

“Instead of staying at home, I decided to join my neighbour, an event cinematographer, so I used to go to his shop because I was just fascinated with seeing all these things. That was the beginning of my journey into cinematography,” he said. “My parents spoke to the neighbour, but he said that he doesn’t train. He recommended me to someone else, so I was with that person for about a year. Then I got to see Akin Alabi. I used to see him in music videos then as Akin Alabi Films, so I checked him on Facebook and tried to reach out, but I could not get him. I told my mom that I think I should go and work with this person aside from these events because this person is into music production. We finally got to him, and the real journey started when I started working with Akin Alabi.”

Victor’s first three months with Akin Alabi, one of Nigeria’s leading filmmakers and music video directors, almost ended in another fiasco like his previous endeavours.

He told us he was on the team doing nothing for two months, but he had decided it was what he wanted, and he’d do anything to make it work.

Victor ensured the failure that crested over his previous endeavours didn’t triumph over his cinematography training.

“When I started working with Akin Alabi, the training was supposed to be for three months. But in the first two months, I was running errands for my senior colleagues,” he said. “While running the errands, I would just come back and look at what they were doing. I could not touch the system. In my third month at the academy, we had moved to College Road, and our house was now on the same street as the office, so I was given the key to arrive early to open the office and clean up everywhere.

“Whenever I got to the office early in the morning, I used that time to practice what I saw the previous day, and that was what I kept doing.”

A few weeks after immersing himself in teaching himself, Akin Alabi gave him a task that would decide his future on the team and define his career in cinematography.

“In my final week, Akin Alabi called me to his office and asked what I had learned so far, and I told him. Then he gave me a task to do, I did it, and he said it was impressive and would retain me. That was how I didn’t leave after three months, so I started working with him.”

Akin Alabi’s words became the validation that gave Victor the fillip to clear the cloud of uncertainty that surrounded his previous attempts to acquire a skill. More than ever, he became confident that success was ascertained.

“If I had failed the task, I wouldn’t be able to continue working on the team. maybe I would not be doing this now.” Victor found his rhythm from that moment, and there was no stopping him.

Like many other young Nigerians, police harassment and indiscriminate arrest of young people were some of the major events that shaped his childhood. This experience has been a prominent theme in some of his works.

As he was honing his cinematography skills, the Nigerian skit industry dominated by creators entertaining millions of social media users with content created with their smartphones was also going through its formative stage.

When he finally mastered the cinematography skills, it was about time the industry was gaining more recognition while creators were getting a better reward for their passion. Victor’s skill came in handy as the industry was transiting from skits made with smartphones to professional cameras.

The Nigerian skit industry has become an important part of our daily lives and we have to admit it. But the industry has gone through different phases. In the early 2010s, when Instagram was just gaining popularity among Nigerians, users could only post a 15-second video. With their smartphones, internet connection, and social media accounts, content creators entertained millions of fans across the globe with their short skits filmed and edited with their smartphones. 

With their 15-second skits, early content creators in the Nigerian internet space like Oluwakaponeski, Woli Arole, Dr Craze and Ade, Klinton Cod, Ogbeni Adan, Oluwadolarz, Aphrican Ace and Maraji, among others had fans glued to their smartphones addicted to their content.

Around 2016, the industry began to experience evolution, creators started introducing DSLR cameras and high-end editing suites to create their skits, and the industry started taking another shape as a movie-making business. Patronage from corporate organisations increased while local television stations began including some of the skits as a loop into their daily broadcast schedules. At that point, smartphone skits could no longer fit into the next phase of skit-making. Brands and TV stations demanded higher-quality videos shot and edited by professionals.

During this time, Victor was also mastering his cinematography skills, and he finally became the go-to guy for one of the skit makers – Babatunde ‘Oluwadolarz’ Ogunleye, who was searching for a cinematographer to shoot a TV-standard skit.

“Oluwadolarz was shooting with a phone then. When he was supposed to submit some videos to a TV station, they said they needed better quality, so he reached out to me after seeing one of my pictures where I held a camera and said he wanted us to do something together. It was just supposed to be a one-time thing, so after submitting the videos, he liked the quality and said we should stick to the camera, and that was how we started working together,” Victor said.

Shortly after then, his work caught the attention of other skit makers searching for someone who could shoot their skits with the right cinematic apparatus that would make them more appealing to their audience.

“So, while I was working with Oluwadolarz, many people thought I was working with only Oluwadolarz, so many of them didn’t want to reach out because they didn’t want any issues,” he said. “It was MC Lively that reached out and asked if I was open to working with other people; I said ‘yes’. So I started working with Lively also.”

Since his career as a cinematographer took off in 2016, Victor Edem has become the creative behind most of videos that make us giggle on social media.

In 2020, when film production was suspended due to COVID-19 pandemic, social media content creators solidified their hold on users with their content. Since then, the number of social media content coming out of Nigeria every month has continued to increase.

Victor told us he shoots more than 30 skits in a month, and he’s just one of the many cinematographers shooting comedy skits in the country. “Sometimes I could shoot five skits in a day for Mr Macaroni, MC Lively and Kie Kie. So in a week, I can shoot for four creators and shoot my skits.”

From the young boy who quit secondary school at 17, quit computer engineering training after six months and was bullied out of Technical School, Victor has become one of the most prominent figures in the Nigerian skit industry said to be worth ₦‎2 billion as of 2020.

With promises of more opportunities, the industry continues to grow as more young people with smartphones, internet and social media accounts are making an inroad into the industry in a country where more than 23 million people are jobless, according to the NBS.

Victor has now moved from being a skit cinematographer to a content creator. He has been creating comedy skits under his name. One of his earliest works was nominated in the new Social Media Content Creator Category of the eighth Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Award (AMVCA) in 2022.

“My friend – Kelvin, a brilliant scriptwriter, sent me the script,” he told us. “I started shooting my content because I just wanted to try out different things aside from comedy because some of my content is not just comedy.”

In 2023, he earned another AMVCA nomination in the same category for his November 2022 skit – The Activist.

We asked him if he plans to crossover into Nollywood like Mr Macaroni and Broda Shaggi, who are taking opportunities in Nollywood.

“This is what I want to continue doing for now,” Victor told us. “For now, it’s just for us to keep doing our stuff the way we do it. There is YouTube, and we are using it to put our stuff out there.”

 

Interview: Anjolaoluwa Abiosun & Michael Orodare

Cover Design: Samjoe Mbanefo