Nollywood actor, Richard Mofe Damijo (RMD) has stated that he’s an unambitious person.
In Success Is Not Served A La Carte, a new book authored by revered journalist, Azuh Arinze, the veteran actor revealed that unlike many individuals, he’s “very unambitious”.
While maintaining that everyone wants the glamour that comes with being an actor, RMD advised up and coming actors to work on their talents and be prayerful.
“Everybody wants the glamour of an actor. Nobody wants the hard work. It is a lot of hard work. It is like being a mechanic or being a pilot, you need to practice, you need to oil your talent, work on it and then pray for God’s guidance,” he was quoted as saying.
In the new book which can only be presently pre-ordered, RMD described his time as president of the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP), as a sore point of his career.
He said he was tired of running the association with his money when he was president, adding that industry leaders were busy doing the wrong things at the detriment of the industry growth.
His words; “That was a very sore point in my career. And a lot of things accounted for that. It was a time when associations in the country were down, on hold, because you find that people don’t submit to the collective and you have an association where nobody is bound to be responsible to the association, to answer to the association. So, you find that in a whole lot of ways, there was a case where one wanted to do a whole lot of things, but the members were not there to do it.
“What you now find is the younger ones who are looking up to you for direction coming more to meetings whereas the people who are the leaders in the industry, they all are busy doing the wrong things and there was a time too when everybody needed to make a choice and a lot of the officials abandoned ship. So, at a point it was just me and the secretary. It was hard to be able to move forward, it is not an association that is funded in anyway. I got tired of running the place with my own money. To keep the office open, I was paying and at a point, the secretary-general was also contributing.
“After a while, it was just a question of the person waiting for the next person to come in and take over. It was just a sore point because I really would have wanted to do a whole lot of things, but when I didn’t get the kind of support I should get, everybody had to abandon ship at some point. It is a failure that I have accepted. It is something that I can’t blame anybody else for. I was the president and since I didn’t do much then, the blame comes to me. If it were to be the other way too, I think the credit would have also come to me. My prayer is that whoever is there now should be able to do his own.”