Feature/OPED
Why ‘Half Of A Yellow Sun’ Didn’t Make It
Isedehi Aigbogun
Being an English teacher all my work-life, it would be a huge shame on me if I were able to, somehow, approach the criticism of the movie, Half of a Yellow Sun, from a biased point of view. So, like my colleagues and I would normally do for essays, I will list out a couple of criteria that will be used in “marking” this movie.
Remember in secondary school, where C, O, E, MA (or whichever kind is used—we have a variety of this mark scheme) stands for Content, Organization, Expression, and Mechanical Accuracy? Well, in this case, I’ll be using PTDCP (my coinage) which stands for Premise, Theme, Dialogue, Character, and Pacing.
I’m being modest here; there are over 10 criteria in the more serious international screenwriting world, and a million other points of analysis!
Let me enlighten you a bit: a lot of people do not know that a learned screenwriter can look beyond the pictures of a movie and see the script! Yes, the script! After all, Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, has said that “to make a great movie, you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.”
There are set rules for writing a movie script; which is different from the rules Biyi Bandele used to write his screenplay; which is also extremely different from the rules Chimamanda uses to write her novels, and without wasting further time, we’ll get to some parts of it!
PREMISE:
One thing I learnt teaching English is to always give positive feedback first; so that the learner doesn’t feel entirely bad about his essay. While marking, we appreciate little aspects of the essay such as the child’s use of punctuation in some parts of the essay; his choice of words (even if it’s just one fantastic word, we dwell on it); or if there’s nothing to appreciate about the essay at all, we make comments such as “your noble intentions are appreciated, however, essay writing requires much more”. This is exactly the kind of comment I would make for this movie!
Half of a Yellow Sun details the events of a civil war in Nigeria in the midst of a love story; a story about two lovers caught up in the midst of war. Fantastic! Everyone wants to watch a love story, everyone wants to see how the troubles of our environment—the real movie—affect us domestically, economically; affect our relationship, and what have you. This is definitely deep and well appreciated, thanks to the writer of the original story, Chimamanda. Honestly, this movie could have been internationally successful if this were the only requirement.
Unfortunately for this Half of a Yellow Sun crew, screenwriting requires much more.
For these aforementioned reasons, and especially because the screenwriter is not the originator of the premise, I’ll give this aspect 8/10.
THEME:
I tried my best to follow through with the major messages that could be got from this movie. The more I tried to follow through, the more disappointments I got. A number of themes can be identified in this movie apart from War and its Effects: Love, Familial Expectations, Friendship, Wealth and Business Opportunities, Ethnic Bias, Charity, Academia, Death, and so much more. The script appears to be ambitious in its evaluation of theme, yet not encompassing in such a way that the audience feels nothing experiencing them.
This, unknown to the screenwriter is very distracting especially because he always disconnects the audience from the major story when he isn’t telling the major story, and almost like an attempt to tell different other almost disconnected stories. My point may not be clear at the moment; this is because I just might need to explain clearly what I mean with how the characters of the movie are portrayed.
If your audience is placed in a situation whereby they have to make the effort to meet you half way in your story-telling, then you’re getting some things wrong. 4/10
CHARACTERS:
I could write a 10-page essay on why all the characters in this movie do not work! One major reason is how flat they are. They are the same from the beginning to the end. Their reactions to certain situations are expected, and so there isn’t any element of surprise in the nature of the characters.
They start off all nice and noble, continue, and end the same way.
There are instances in the movie where I hoped they would change: take charge, recluse, rebel, create some tension for us, make us wait for the unexpected, but that never happens. The characters are nothing but pawns in the story; helplessly hopped around on the chess board, and not actively doing anything to change the world they live in. And this includes the major characters.
Oh, wait! I see what happened here. The movie crew probably thought that if Hollywood stars played the major roles in the movie, everyone would be mesmerized, and no one would notice just how weak the characters really are. Majority of Nigerians who applaud this movie could be fooled, but I couldn’t, and certainly not the international world!
There’s a screenwriting trick to helping you get your characters take charge and do more, and it’s as simple as creating conflict in every scene.
A screenplay has basically 40-70 scenes, and something pushy must happen in every of those scenes. These things would naturally form the base of your THEME (see above)—but nothing ever really happens in this script. The characters walk around as though they are a surprise bomb (which never explodes); like they are having the audience experience some sort of suspense, but really, they are, in fact, plain annoying, and that’s because they don’t have enough substance to enable us care about them.
Take a look at the dirty maid Odenigbo had to sleep with, for instance—from where to where?! The audience feels more surprised and disgusted (seems good, but isn’t, given the circumstance) in Odenigbo than solely disappointed; such behaviour was never hinted in his character from the start, and the Mom didn’t seem quite convincing either.
Maybe the maid should have been portrayed as truly tempting, you know, like a video vixen. That would have worked, but guess what, that would have changed the whole story as well, which to me would have been a better choice; a screenwriter doesn’t have to reproduce the novel’s characters verbatim; there is what is called creative license, A.K.A. tweaking. Come on, Biyi, Chimamanda has more space to create tension with such character in her novel than you do with your screenplay!
Not to forget, at some point in the movie, it appears the audience are waiting for something to happen till finally the explosion occurs at the wedding, which no character is responsible for—why the hell not? Then there is a dramatic display of Olanna caring about some lecturer friend we only met once, and who never said anything worthwhile. An explosion kills him and the audience is expected to care with Olanna?!
To crown it all, what movie doesn’t have an antagonist? I’m not even sure I met any of the villains apart from my darling Hakeem Kae-Kazim (Captain Dutse) whose character was distastefully under-developed, and unfairly allowed to be hated by the audience. Some villains can be loved by the audience too! Did you know? I’ll just stop here. 2/10
DIALOGUE:
This screenplay makes all the mistakes a script could possibly make in the aspect of dialogue. Even though there are a few memorable lines; these lines feel like perfect lines poached from the novel, or maybe, just maybe, the stubborn decision of the Hollywood actors in the movie to switch things up a bit. One of such lines would be when Odenigbo says “I’m too old to die young from smoking”, maybe Biyi Bandele wrote this himself, maybe not. But I’ll settle with not, going by the majority of dialogue lines that exist in the movie that aren’t in the same category as this.
However, the message in the dialogue of this script is always acceptable in terms of grammatical or stylistic correctness. But I guess we have to give this credit to the actors.
Most times in this movie, though, as with all our Nollywood movies, the dialogue’s too on-the-nose: too precise, saying things that are too straightforward, too explicit, or more regrettably repeating the same information again and again; letting us know so many times that the war is between two tribes; or Odenigbo’s mother continually asking for a kid and quoting traditions the audience already has a lead on. The worst mistake a screenwriter can make is saying what the audience already knows!
Except it’s going to be ambiguous, dialogue in movies should have, embedded in them, connotations with a plethora of meanings that just blows the mind of the audience either in a humorous or in a thought provoking manner.
The dialogue in this movie is a sure sign that Biyi is a pure playwright and nothing more. It is only in a play that you need to say things over and over again; maybe because of the stage set up— to avoid confusion. However, in this script, it appears the dialogue exists to take up some time, and lengthen the movie like how it’s done in a play script. When in actual fact, more action and story beats would have helped this screenplay. Or better still, punchier, quotable lines.
At some point, the script gets obsessed with making use of talking heads; people sitting around talking, with no associating action. Boring! The dialogue most times are long—quite understandably for a first draft—but that’s why it’s a first draft: the first of the other rewrites that need to be written. The dialogues could have, instead, been rewritten to achieve the “lean and mean” mantra of international screenwriting in subsequent drafts.
It is important to keep in mind that the international world is a hungry place, and movies are a learning ground; people learn to talk pretty from movies, and replicating what happens in real life in a movie dialogue isn’t going to give one that privilege of having one’s lines adopted, and when people don’t remember one’s lines, they don’t remember one! 5/10.
PACING:
This is the most overlooked aspect of film making/screenwriting in Nollywood, and I’ll show you how. Firstly, have you noticed how those block buster movies in Hollywood has your heart racing with expectations at as early as 15 minutes? You already have been introduced to all the major characters and situations have already been established by 20 mins. This tempo carries on till the end of the movie, and you can’t believe you just finished watching a 2-hour movie in what felt like 45 minutes. That’s pacing. It basically means not wasting time, going straight to the point, being mean, finishing it off, getting in as late as possible and leaving as early as possible, and what have you.
Yes, half of a Yellow Sun does that with the first 10 minutes, kinda, which makes us continue watching the movie with great hopes and with an open mind, before things stop happening, and the pacing drops till the movie ends.
There’s a process of writing movies to be fast paced. There are rules. It might not make much sense here because we are looking at the movie, and not the script. But take it from me, executing pacing is easy peasy. 4/10.
Five criteria. One screenwriter. Other screenwriters may have more to say with other criteria (I intentionally left out “Plot” because I didn’t want to score this movie any lower), but I guess this should be more than enough to help us understand why Half of a Yellow Sun didn’t stand a chance at the international level. 23/50
Percentage: 46%
Grade: D
Isedehi Aigbogun (ISD)
B.A., M.A., PhD (in view), English Language, UNILAG.
International Screenwriter, Script Analyst, Movie Critic
By Louis Strydom
Last year, I argued in my piece Lean Carbon, Just Power that a limited and temporary increase in African carbon emissions is justified to meet the continent’s urgent electrification needs.
That position was not a retreat from climate ambition. It laid out a credible lean-carbon pathway that reconciles power systems development realities with climate arithmetic.
The central question remains: not whether emissions must fall, but how much temporary headroom is tolerable to accelerate energy prosperity for a continent responsible for roughly 4% of global CO2.
The flexibility equation
The future of Africa’s electrification is neither “all renewables tomorrow” nor “gas indefinitely”. Intermittent renewables alone cannot power the continent’s fragile grids at scale. Solar and wind require highly dispatchable power capacity to ensure the reliability of the system.
The real choice is not between renewables and fossil fuels in the abstract; it is between flexible firm power that complements solar and wind, and the de facto alternative: the increasing reliance on high-emissions diesel backup and widespread grid instability.
I argue that a realistic transition strategy must embrace “a capped carbon overdraft”: a strictly bounded, time-limited deployment of flexible power plants running on gas that supports the deployment of renewables and declines according to a binding schedule. This strategy means accepting minimal, temporary emissions to allow for a faster, cleaner and more resilient clean transition.
The response to this argument drew serious scrutiny. Three objections deserve a direct answer.
First: Does the case for flexible thermal power hold on a full life cycle basis?
It does. Our power system studies in Nigeria, Mozambique, and Southern Africa consistently reach the same conclusion – the least-cost long-term system is renewables-led, with flexible engines balancing variability. That holds across capital, fuel, maintenance, carbon pricing, and decommissioning. South Africa’s Integrated Resource Plan 2025, approved in October, makes the point concretely: it projects 105 GW of new capacity by 2039 with renewables as backbone, yet includes 6 GW of gas-to-power by 2030 explicitly for grid stability. Even the continent’s most industrialised economy concludes it needs dispatchable thermal capacity to underpin a renewables-heavy system. The question is not whether firm power is needed, but how to make it as clean and flexible as possible.
Second: Does this argument talk over Africa’s ambition to leapfrog fossil fuels?
No. It is designed around that ambition. Wärtsilä launched the world’s first large-scale 100% hydrogen-ready engine power plant concept in 2024, certified by TÜV SÜD, with orders opening in 2025. Ammonia engine tests now demonstrate up to 90% greenhouse gas reductions versus diesel. These are not roadmaps. They are ready-to-use technologies. The honest difficulty is timing. Sub-Saharan grids averaged 56 hours of monthly outages in 2024. The African diesel generator market is growing at nearly 7% a year, projected to reach 1.3 billion dollars by 2030. Nigerian businesses spend up to 40% of operational costs on fuel for backup power. That is the real counterfactual – not a continent neatly powered by sun and wind, but a billion-dollar diesel habit deepening every year the grid stays unreliable. Even Germany is tendering 10 GW of hydrogen-ready gas plants with mandated conversion by 2035 to 2040. If Europe’s largest economy needs transitional thermal flexibility to backstop an 80% renewables target, insisting low-income African nations skip that step is not climate leadership. It is development deferred.
Third: Does the carbon comparison include full life cycle methane?
It must. Methane leakage materially worsens the climate profile of gas-to-power because methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂. If leakage exceeds a few per cent of production, gas loses its advantage over coal on a 20-year timeframe.
But the IEA notes that 40% of fossil methane emissions could be eliminated at no net cost with existing technology. My claim that gas has a lower footprint than coal is conditional on aggressive methane management – eliminating flaring and venting, enforcing measurement under frameworks like the EU Methane Regulation and OGMP 2.0. Without those conditions, the arithmetic fails. But the real choice in most African markets is not between pristine gas and pristine renewables. It is between ageing coal, a growing fleet of unregulated diesel generators, and new fuel-flexible plants that start or transition to gas and convert to hydrogen or ammonia on a contractual schedule. Displacing diesel and coal with well-managed gas in future-fuel-ready engines cuts CO₂, local pollution, and water use now, while building the infrastructure for fuels that eliminate fossil dependence.
The critics are right to demand rigour, full life cycle accounting, methane transparency, and credible timelines. Those are exactly the conditions that make a lean-carbon pathway work. Africa does not seek permission to pollute. It seeks the tools to end energy poverty while peaking emissions early and declining fast. Build engine power plants that run on available fuel today. Mandate their conversion tomorrow. The carbon overdraft stays small. The payback stays fast. And the technology to switch to sustainable fuels is already here.
Louis Strydom is the Director of Growth and Development for Africa and Europe at Wärtsilä Energy
You’re back home after mudik (homecoming), the suitcases are unpacked, and the excitement of being with family for Eid already feels like a long time ago. But just because Eid is over doesn’t mean the special connection of being with family has to fade. Here are the best group chat features for beating the post-Raya blues.
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Keep The Vibe Going by Sharing Ramadan Highlights
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Keep the Memories Rolling with Status: Your Status feed doesn’t have to go quiet just because you’re back home. Post the most memorable throwback photos from the Eid reunion and add questions to spark responses like “What was your favourite Raya dish?” Add music and stickers to Status to keep the energy alive.
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Express Yourself with Text Stickers: Turn inside jokes, family slogans, or a favourite Eid quote into a Text Sticker. It’s a quick, personalised way to add some warmth and humour to the group chat.
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Skip the Stock Cards, Use Meta AI for a Personal Touch: Don’t just send a generic “Hi” or “Good morning” in the family chat. Use Meta AI to make your personalised greeting card or quickly transform a single photo into an animated image to send a heartfelt, animated check-in.
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Schedule The Next Reunion
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Plan Your Next Post-Raya Get-Together: The blues often hit when the fun ends. Keep spirits up by creating a new Event in the group chat right away. Add event reminders so everyone doesn’t miss the opportunity to connect.
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Schedule a Call, Don’t Just Say “Call Me”: Carry on the family tradition of staying connected, even when you’re miles apart. Tap + then Schedule a call in the Calls tab to lock in a regular “Post-Raya Check-in” video call. Send a reminder so everyone can join on time.
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Keep the Raya Spirit Alive by Getting Everyone Involved
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Assign yourself a fun “tag” in the family group: Are you the one who always ends up cooking? Or the one who plans the itinerary for family trips? Or the master of GIFs who keeps everyone amused? Use the Member Tag feature in the group to give yourself a witty, funny, or practical role—”Next Event Planner” or “Tech Support Guru,” maybe?. Member tags can be customised for each group you’re in.
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Share a Spontaneous ‘I Miss You’ Video: Did you just see something that reminded you of the reunion? Press and hold the camera icon to record a spontaneous Video Notes message. It’s faster than typing and instantly brings warmth and real-time emotion back into the group.
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Digital Hugs: Making the Long-Distance Moment Count
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Share a Moving Memory: Don’t just send a still photo. Share a Live or Motion Photo to capture the ambient sound and movement of a recent Eid moment. It makes your memories feel more vivid, personal, and real—a perfect antidote to feeling disconnected.
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Your Group Chat Background: Create a vibe with Meta AI: Don’t settle for a plain background for your family group chat. Use Meta AI to generate unique, custom chat wallpapers that reflect something uniquely memorable to your family: be it food, travel or a sport that unites everyone. Every time you open the chat, you’ll feel the warmth, not the distance.
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Make Sure No One Misses Out
No More FOMO: Send the Conversation History: Just added a family member who couldn’t make it to mudik? When adding a new member, you can now send up to 100 recent messages with the Group Message History feature. No need to recap; let them catch up instantly and feel included from the first tap.
By Olumide Balogun
Nigerians are natural explorers. Whether finding the best supplier in Balogun market, hunting down a recipe for party jollof, or looking for the most affordable flight out of Lagos, we are always searching.
Today, human curiosity is expanding, and the way Nigerians express it is evolving. We are speaking to our phones, snapping photos of things we like, and asking incredibly complex questions. For the Nigerian business owner, understanding this shift is a massive opportunity to get discovered by eager customers.
Here are four ways AI is rewriting how Nigerians search, along with simple steps to ensure your business is exactly what they find.
1. Visual Discovery is the New Normal
People are increasingly using their cameras to discover the world around them. Picture someone spotting a brilliant pair of sneakers in traffic and wanting to know exactly where to buy them. Today, shoppers simply take out their phones and search visually.
Tools like Google Lens now process over 25 billion visual searches every single month, and many of these searches are from people looking to make a purchase.
How to adapt: Your product’s visual appeal is paramount. Make sure you upload clear, high-quality images of your products to your website and social media. When a customer snaps a picture of a bag that looks like the one you sell, having great photos ensures your business pops up in their visual search results.
2. Conversations Replace Simple Keywords
Shoppers are asking highly nuanced, conversational questions. They are typing queries like, “Where can I find affordable leather shoes in Ikeja that are open on Sundays and do home delivery?”
To handle these detailed questions, new features like AI Overviews act like a superfast librarian that has read everything on the web. It provides users with a perfectly organised summary and links to dig deeper.
How to adapt: Answer your customers’ questions before they even ask. Create detailed, helpful content on your website and fully update your Google Business Profile. List your opening hours, delivery areas, and unique services clearly. This ensures the technology easily finds your details and recommends your business when a customer asks a highly specific question.
3. Intent Matters More Than Exact Words
Predicting every single word a customer might use to find your product is a huge task for any business owner. Thankfully, modern search technology focuses on the underlying need behind a search.
If someone searches for “how to bring small dogs on flights,” AI understands that the person likely needs to buy an airline-approved pet carrier. The technology looks at the true intent of the shopper.
How to adapt: You no longer need to obsess over guessing exact keywords. By using AI-powered campaigns, you allow the technology to understand your products and match them to the customer’s true needs. Your business will show up for highly relevant searches, bringing you customers who are actively looking for solutions you provide.
4. Smart Assistants Handle the Heavy Lifting
Running a business in Nigeria requires incredible hustle. Managing digital marketing on top of daily operations takes significant time and energy. The next frontier in digital advertising introduces agentic capabilities, which hold a simple promise of delivering better results for your business with much less effort.
The technology now acts as your personalised assistant.
How to adapt: You can simplify your marketing by using the Power Pack of AI-driven campaigns, including Performance Max. You simply provide your business goals, your budget, and your creative assets like photos and videos. The AI automatically finds new, high-value customers across Google Search, YouTube, and the web. It adapts your ads in real time to match exactly what the shopper is looking for, allowing you to focus on running your business.
The language of curiosity is constantly expanding. Nigerians are discovering brands in entirely new ways using cameras, voice notes, and highly specific questions. By understanding these behaviours and embracing helpful AI tools, you can let the technology connect eager customers directly to your digital doorstep.
Olumide Balogun is a Director at Google West Africa
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