Inkblot Presents Jemima Osunde (Toun Odumosu), Blossom Chukwujekwu (Joseph Fineboy), Kate Henshaw (Fatima Odumosu), Adore Egbuson-Akande (Ebube Nwachukwu), Adeolu Adefarasin (Patrick), Wofai Fada (Binta), Osas Ighodaro (Angela), Kalu Ikeagwu (Ifeanyi) Wale Ojo (Chuka), Folarin Falz Falana (Quam). Director of Photography, Pindem Lot, Idowu Adedapo; Screenplay by Chinaza Onuzo; Producers, Chinaza Onuzo, Zulu Oyibo, Kene Okwuosa, Isioma Osaje; Director, Tope Oshin. © 2018
New Money starts where Lionheart stopped. One is about inheritance, the other is about a merger of two business empires. One is ready to head the conglomerate. The other is still a twenty-three-year-old child, not so sure can be a CEO of a conglomerate. Both leads, of course, have a single underlying responsibility: new generation takeover. Here in New Money, we catch Chuka (Wale Ojo) embroiled in the appointment of a CEO for Audere Holdings. Only this time, he doesn’t run onto the camera, disheveled, breathing out his lungs, in the early morning hours on a deserted beach. He got away at that time. If he thinks he is shrewd enough to steal away the CEO portfolio from the rightful owner, his niece, this time around, he must be joking. The twenty-three years old slyly outfoxed him to his chagrin.
New Money movie reminds me of my high school days when I followed illegal diamond miners into swamps and mangroves at night. Mostly, I was used as a sentry. These were usually two-hour gigs, to pull the gravel and wash it. On one such a gig, the illegal miners got lucky and found a diamond that sold for a quarter of a million. They went crazy, and in the club that night, they give all customers carte blanche to drink on us. “Everybody in the club must drink on me!” one yelled out to the crowd. The Lebanese trader had dashed the leader of the crew, a brand new second-hand sedan car. Imagine my friends washing the sedan with a beer in the parking lot. Before the weekend was over, the car got totally busted. I enjoyed part of that windfall too. I was a bagman and banker for most of them, illiterate ones I mean. They were lavishing.
When the movie introduces Toun Odumosu (Jemima Osunde) and her mother Fatima Odumosu (Kate Henshaw), they are barely surviving, running the out of the way cookery. Toun had other dreams of her own. As playful as she is, Toun shows seriousness towards a designing career. Her boyfriend, Quam, steals from her all the time, though she seemingly enjoys it. He got her to pawn the only sewing machine she’s got on his behalf. He is a leech practically, feeding on Toun. Fatima (Kate Henshaw), her mother, painfully raises money from the restaurant to support the family.
Toun’s mother is morose and unsmiling even with her customers in the cookery. We come to know later on her dark marital past, which she has never got passed. She had married a wealthy billionaire, Ifeanyi (Isioma Osaje). And being that she hails from the other side of town, the society and even Ifeanyi’s mother refused to bless her marriage to her son. But by then, she was pregnant with Toun and kept it a secret. It turns out, Ebube (Adore Egbuson-Akande), who Ifeanyi married, could not conceive a child. Upon his death, the only heir is Toun, and wants her to inherit all his business interests.
Fatima is tongue-tied to explain when this one day, Ebubu, dressed in black, comes knocking at her door and asking for Toun. She comes with news which Fatima did not really want her to tell. “Your father is dead, Ebubu discloses. “Yeah, he died years ago,” Toun corrects. “No, he died three weeks ago, and we buried him today,” Ebubu counter updates. Fatima’s eye is downcast as the shame and truth hit home while her daughter’s mouth is agape. Toun looks in her mother’s face for answers. “Tell me,” “He asks that he tells you himself,” Ebubu leaves Toun the message that her father, Ifeanyi, had left for her on a tablet.
As she turned on the machine, she learned that the man who had walked, limping into the store she worked and had tried caressing her chin and left her wad of naira notes, was her father. “I could have known you better…I wanted to talk to you just once…before I died,” Ifeanyi speaks to his daughter. So, the older gentleman in a chauffeur-driven land rover was not trying to hustle her after all. He had died, leaving Toun his business interests as the only survivor. A billionaire! Fatima, of course, had been sidelined in her marriage with Ifeanyi. Still, she had no reason to have kept it from Toun, especially lying about it, that her father died years ago. This is the ax to grind with her daughter. It happens amidst tears and regretful statements. Between mother and daughter, they hug and forgive.
New money belabors what can happen when one wakes up from a downtrodden side of town, with barely a copper to one’s name and thrusts into a sky-high mansion across town. And a billion naira to one’s name for a spending dough. Toun retrieves her sewing machine from the pawn. She gives her boyfriend, Quam money, to pay for his certification exam. As a gift, a paid-for apartment and a new car on her best friend Binta’s (Wofai Fada) birthday. She charters an entire bar to cater to her and her friends, while she danced on top of chairs. She’s on top of the world. Officers at Audere Group are not happy about this. What would they do?
Toun is instructed by her father to head his conglomerate as a CEO: A store clerk, in her early twenties, to sit in a board room with shareholders, as head of the Audere Group of companies. Toun is unbelievable. Her uncle, Chuka (Wale Ojo), who is on the company’s board, is hot to sideline Toun from controlling the company. He did not know that the little niece, Toun, is as smart as the young generations that come after us. Chuka wants to head the company as CEO instead of Toun, primarily when, by accident, she invests in her boyfriend’s gambling business. They, Chuka and his cohorts, like Patrick (Adeolu Adefarasin), interpret that as illegal gambling, which is not a good optic for the company, they claim.
As it turns out, Toun stumbles on the most lucrative business investment in Nigeria to date. She buys the gambling entity, Shayo-Unlimited Bet-under the umbrella of Audere Group for a non-refusing offer of 3 billion nairas. The gambling holding could bring the company so much more in revenue, never imagined. Toun’s ambition and future, by and by, are not so much with Audere Group than her fashion designing. The board had given her a stated date to meet and hear about her CEO portfolio acceptance. In that meeting, she told the board of her purchase of the gambling hand, which she clarified the future of gambling in Nigeria. She then appoints Angela (Osas Ighodaro), her uncle’s daughter, her first cousin, as the CEO. And she walks out and on to the fashion design show, her dream.
Whereas the powers that be at Audere Group underestimated the business ingenuity of Toun; by chance or sheer luck, or the excellent spirit of her dead father, her impulsive purchase of the gambling entity surprises them all. To another extent, she generously pays her boyfriend the ten percent agent fee of three hundred million nairas. The screenplay writer achieves his sense of ambition by showing the surprising capability of Toun, who can pull some swift deals. The writer created a feckless, helpless young shopgirl and threw her amid a circus of hungry lions, who make jokes about her ignorance and inexperience. In the end, she proves to be one that can walk above the fray. Her character as a lead is complete.
I must have sensed a resemblance between Lionheart (2018), Genevieve Nnaji, and the lead player in New Money. I may be wrong, but I find a striking similarity between the older Caught In the Act actress and the younger. Check out their built, the nuances, and the careless manner in handling the roles, which is classic. Do you hear their laughter? Tell me they are no twins. And both movies, Lionheart and New Money, deal with the themes of handing over to younger generations. In Delivery Boy (2018), she plays the slot who would later detonate and blow herself up together with the Bukuharam recruiter. Here, Jemima Osunde is butter.
New money is, however, a hybrid of the episodic features, Castle and Castle, without Tega Castle (Richard Mofi-Damijo), but with Blossom Chukwujekwu and Daniel Etim-Effiong, and Remi Castle in Episode 2 of Castle and Castle (2018). As usual, the Castle and Castle firm concern itself mainly with family legal affairs as we find, besides the daily episodic routine, in Big Daddy, and now in New Money.