By Ayo Onikoyi

Verdant Zeal, a Pan- African multidisciplinary marketing and communications Group concluded its 10^th “Innovention Series” themed “African Content and New Consciousness” on Thursday October 20, 2022 with a launch of a web platform known as Archhub Africa a.k.a. AHA. The launch came with a premiere of its first original short film titled “ The Delegates” at the EbonyLive Place.

The short film which had more than 40-children cast was shot in an elementary school and the plot depicts the social evils of politics in our society and how the society encourages it and ultimately pays for their ignorance, greed and lack of vision.

According to the Chief Operating Officer of Verdant Zeal, Dipo Adesida, The Delegates is the first of more short and feature films to come out of the stable of AHA. He said at least five films, titled Nonetheless, Fawa House, Eko Palava and two others are in production stages.

Speaking on the big idea behind the launch of AHA, Adesida, explained, “AHA is an acronym, it means Archhub Africa. AHA is a fulcrum for creating content, engaging content, educational content, entertaining content, durable content of Nigerian and African themes. When we say AHA, it’s like an exclamatory expression, like wow, so what we want to do is create content that wows. We want to be able to bring into conversations things that people know about but in a format that is interesting. We want to be able to bring some social issues to life and bring some certain characters to life.”

He explained further, “As we discussed during the Innovention series, African content is on the rise. There is this consciousness that Africans are holding their own with their ways of life that is fast becoming acceptable everywhere. Before now, if you are not in a suit you are considered improperly dressed. But the reverse is the case, when you can wear native attires to the office 5 days of the week.

Even our music has taken over everywhere. Before it used to be foreign music everywhere but now it is our African local music. Now you can sustain a party with Nigerian music for a week without repeating a track.

Now we are proud of what we create, the niche needs to be more than a movement, it needs to be codified, it needs to be templatedolu so that it can be replicated, better monetized and given full expression.”