Make WIPO work for Nigeria By KC Olumayowa

In 2016, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announced that it will open one of two African regional offices in Nigeria.
While Nigeria has been a member of WIPO since 1995, WIPO does not yet have a physical presence in the African region.
Mr. Afam Ezekude, Director-General of the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) has praised the decision as a landmark event that will raise Africa’s intellectual property (IP) profile and put Nigeria on the international map in terms of IP protection and administration.
Nigeria is indeed a critical country for WIPO.
As one of the largest economies in Africa, and with several vibrant creative sectors (including but not limited to Nollywood and traditional science), the nation is well-positioned to be a leader the international intellectual property landscape.
Nigeria must thus have a clear vision for how a local physical WIPO presence will help to advance its domestic development agenda.
WIPO currently has five external offices in Singapore, Brazil, Japan, Russia, and China.
These nations engage intentionally with the intellectual property frameworks developed by several international bodies such as WIPO and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and they provide good examples for how to utilize local WIPO offices for domestic benefit.
For example, WIPO opened its first external office in Singapore in 2005 and subsequently opened an Arbitration and Mediation Center there in 2010.
These centers augmented Singapore’s efforts to develop the nation as a location of choice for alternative dispute resolution in the Asia Pacific region.
Singapore has been so active on the international intellectual property stage that in 2017, Mr.
Daren Tang, CEO of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (Ipos), was elected as the first Singaporean chairman of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR).
WIPO opened its Brazil office in 2009.
The country had also been actively involved in setting the agenda for global intellectual property rights prior to this, from negotiating aggressively for flexibilities for developing countries in the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to proposing key instruments at WIPO to allow access to copyrighted works for educational activities, people with disabilities, libraries and archives.
Brazil continues to stay active today, recently proposing new digital copyright rules for the WTO.
One of WIPO’s most recent external offices opened in China in 2014 after lengthy negotiations about how the office would benefit the nation.
Prior to the opening of that office, China had already invested heavily in IP to develop national standards that worked for their domestic goals.
For example, when the U.S.
sued China over piracy issues in front of the WTO, China could maintain a robust defense on its interpretation of international copyright rules.
China continues to make WIPO’s local presence advantageous to the country.
WIPO now accepts Chinese and Japanese characters as international trademarks, which is a huge step in providing adequate global protection for Asian and non-western brands.
The office also hosted a conference focused on how IP and innovation can benefit China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative to promote closer connectivity among central Asia and the rest of the world.
China has remained so active that it produced a record-breaking number of patent applications (over 1 million) in 2015 while continuing to drive growth in WIPO patent applications.
It is certainly a victory for Nigeria to host the first WIPO office for the African region, but the nation must be careful not to play a passive role in developing the vision for its opening.
While there is a cadre of excellent IP lawyers in Nigeria, the country has not yet developed a robust IP system dedicated to promoting domestic innovation.
Active national leadership with IP expertise committed to the Nigerian agenda will be required in order for Nigerian creativity to flourish with the new WIPO office.
What should the WIPO office do and how can it advance local interests for Nigeria and the African continent? Most importantly, the activities of the office should be locally controlled and led.
It should be a generator of national and regional discourse over IP and development.
While IP offices are generally highly political, those politics should reflect local politics instead of advocating for a non-native Nigerian position.
In addition to being locally led, the new WIPO office should actually solve problems.
IP has a tremendous opportunity to add value to the economy, not only in Nigeria, but throughout the continent.
For example, the IP lobby in the U.S, the Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC), responds to local U.S.
interests and facilitates economic opportunities for U.S.
industries.
It recognizes that IP-intensive industries employ more than 40 million Americans and account for 74% of exports and $5.8 trillion in GDP.
To that end, GIPC routinely evaluates the economic value of IP in the U.S.
and advocates for the strength and effective enforcement of IP rights both locally and globally.
The new WIPO office has an opportunity to place a similar role in Nigeria that the GIPC does in the U.S.
However, while WIPO is an international organization that might seem to have greater legitimacy and influence than the people who know and live in Nigeria, it is important for Nigeria not to succumb to an inferiority complex.
It is true that technical assistance from international organizations like WIPO generally come from a European or American perspective.
However, there is a deepening IP expertise on the continent, so Nigeria should ensure that the technical assistance is locally applicable, relevant, and promotes a broader range of developmental interests.
In order to achieve this, the WIPO office should be working in cooperation with national IP offices – not replace them.
WIPO should not be a substitute for investing in local IP offices in Africa.
Rather, the continent should use this opportunity to strengthen its own IP institutions to work most effectively with WIPO.
Olumayowa is a student and author.
She can be reached at [email protected]

Leave a Reply