Days later, the Nigerian Netflix series Shanty Town is still the talk of the town, and more and more people are getting to binge watch it and have their own opinions about the show. People have been criticizing the show for being way too filthy, loaded with nudity, and full of surprising features merely for the sake of being shocked ever since it debuted.
Chichi Nwoka and Ini Edo, the show’s producers, spoke candidly about why exactly they chose this screenplay and what, in their opinion, the lesson of the show is during the show’s launch. What they had to say about their show is as follows:
First, when asked what inspired the show, producers Ini Edo and Chichi Nwoka said:
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INI EDO: What inspired it was first of all the drive to tell Nollywood stories, our own stories, in the way I thought it should be told. That was one of the inspirations I had.
CHICHI NWOKA: When I got the concept for Shanty Town, it was for us to talk about the ill things happening in society. The negative things happening in society. The things that people are not talking about. The negative things that are happening in the slums: organ harvesting, human trafficking, and all those other things that are people are not really paying attention to. That is the concept. We wanted to highlight this underbelly for people to know what we are passing through in the society and we want it to stop. We want women to have freedom, to be able to live their lives.
Since the show came out people have criticized it for being ‘all nonsense, no lesson’. When asked why this particular script was chosen, Ini Edo said:
INI EDO: Why this script? Why this script is just that we realized that there is a need to tell this story. It was something happening in the society whereby nobody was talking about. About women, slave trade, the kind of businesses that go on behind the scenes. Prostitution is really big all over the world. But whereby people in authority are thriving off of this industry. One of the things that we needed to bring to light. The fact that women, it had a lot to do with women, and with kids. And how much more they should be protected and what they are actually going through. And the fact that there is a part of this world where some of us don’t get to experience. But it is actually happening. So I needed people who are sitting up there who are probably unaware that some things like this are going on in our society to know that we need to fix it.