D’banj Advised Me To Milk My Jenifa Brand – Funke Akindele

Nollywood actress and producer, Funke Akindele has come out to open up about D’banj’s important role in her rise to stardom.

She recently had her say while speaking at the 2025 Media Sales Conference of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN) in Lagos, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to her, the singer once asked her what was next for the “Jenifa” brand, and when she said she was moving on, D’banj said she should milk it instead.

Funke added that the musician ended up giving her some money, and she went back to writing more scripts.

Her words, “Nobody made me a star, only God. I wrote my script, and that was it. The first ‘Jenifa’ was released in 2009, which was the turning point.

Amidst the buzz, a club owner reached out to host me at his club, and I met D’banj there.

He asked what I was doing with the ‘Jenifa’ brand. I said, ‘I have moved on. I will do another thing.’ He said, ‘No. You have to milk it. It should not go like that. That’s a brand. Go and write another script.’ He gave me some money, and I went back and continued writing.”

WOW.

Nollywood is a sobriquet that originally referred to the Nigerian film industry. The origin of the term dates back to the early 2000s, traced to an article in The New York Times. Due to the history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition for the term, which has made it a subject to several controversies.

The origin of the term “Nollywood” remains unclear; Jonathan Haynes traced the earliest usage of the word to a 2002 article by Matt Steinglass in the New York Times, where it was used to describe Nigerian cinema.

Charles Igwe noted that Norimitsu Onishi also used the name in a September 2002 article he wrote for the New York Times. The term continues to be used in the media to refer to the Nigerian film industry, with its definition later assumed to be a portmanteau of the words “Nigeria” and “Hollywood”, the American major film hub.

Film-making in Nigeria is divided largely along regional, and marginally ethnic and religious lines. Thus, there are distinct film industries – each seeking to portray the concern of the particular section and ethnicity it represents. However, there is the English-language film industry which is a melting pot for filmmaking and filmmakers from most of the regional industries.