Hakeem Onilogbo did not set out to work in special effects. He set out to be an actor. According to a 2018 Punch interview he was born in Ibadan in the late 1970s. His father, a sales representative, was retrenched between 1987 and 1988, forcing the family to return to Abeokuta, where his father became a taxi driver. In 1996, after completing his secondary school education at Egba Comprehensive High School in Abeokuta, he left home. He slept under a bridge in Lagos. He tried to get into the film industry through acting. He met Taiwo Hassan, popularly known as Ogogo, who told him he needed more than a school leaving certificate to be taken seriously. He met the late Gbenga Adeboye. He worked as a signage artist, a fine arts painter, and a creative professional wherever opportunity opened.
None of it was the thing. None of it was the thing until, by his own account, a figure in white appeared to him in a dream after he became a Christian in 2005 and showed him techniques he had never formally learned anywhere.
“God gave me one talent,”
he told Bismark’s Cave in a 2016 interview,
“which is the power to see and to replicate. Anything I see, I can replicate.”
He calls himself not a makeup artist but a replicator. The distinction matters. A makeup artist beautifies. A replicator recreates reality, and then exceeds it. In another Punch interview , he explained:
“I actually did not learn how to do special effects make-up professionally. It is an innate talent.”
That capacity, operating for years before the industry fully understood what it was witnessing, is how Hakeem Onilogbo became Hakeem Effects, and how Hakeem Effects became one of the most consequential behind-the-scenes figure in the technical elevation of Nollywood.
The Invisible Years
He entered the film industry around 2006, the year he lost everything he had and grabbed the only opportunity available, which was acting. When acting did not take him where he needed to go, he shifted into beauty makeup. He did not stay there long either. As he explained to Punch’s Tofarati Ige in a 2023 interview, he does not like to follow trends; he prefers to be different in anything he does. That preference pushed him toward special effects at a time when sophisticated SFX makeup was still largely absent from Nigerian cinema as a serious discipline.
For roughly fourteen years, he worked on sets, experimented, built techniques from improvised materials because the professional supplies were not available locally, and posted his experiments on Instagram without knowing that anyone significant was watching. “I don’t even know people are watching,” he told Backstage Africa in an interview.
“These have built their confidence that, okay, this is the right person.”
In a 2018 Punch interview, he described the hunger that drove him:
“In 2006, when I lost everything I had, the only opportunity that came my way was acting and of course, I grabbed the opportunity.”
He also did many jobs for free in the early years, believing that doing the work well would eventually speak for itself. His foundational name came on a film set around 2008. According to the Backstage Africa interview, He was working with the late producer Murphy Afolabi, and there were two men called Hakeem on set. Every time Afolabi called the name, both of them would run to him. Afolabi eventually solved the problem by designating him Hakeem Effects, to distinguish him from the other. He adopted the name as his professional identity on his next project, and it has been the only name that matters since.
The pioneering figures he credits for laying the foundation before him include Dagogo Diminas and Gabriel Okorie, popularly known as Gabazzini. He has described them as the generation that pushed the craft forward before he took on the responsibility of bridging the gap between West African standards and global best practices. That framing, of inheritance and then advancement, is one he returns to consistently.
Oloibiri, A Soldier’s Story, and the Award That Changed Everything
His breakthrough productions were Oloibiri and A Soldier’s Story. By his own account, in all the years he had been working before these films, no producer had ever submitted his work for an award. It was Martin Gbados and Rogers Ofime who first submitted his work for the AMAA and AMVCA respectively, and the recognition that followed transformed his career’s public profile overnight.
In 2016 and 2017, he won Africa’s Best Makeup Artist at the Africa Movie Academy Awards. In 2017, he won the Best Makeup Artist at the Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards for Oloibiri. In 2018, he won the AMVCA Best Makeup Artist again, for Tatu, making it consecutive victories at the continent’s most prestigious ceremony for screen content. By the time the awards were accumulating, Kemi Adetiba cast him on King of Boys, which he has described as the single production that defined his career and made the industry begin to see him differently.
King of Boys (2018), Adetiba’s political crime thriller, required the kind of prosthetic and aging work that Nigerian cinema had not consistently attempted. His contributions to the film, which included intricate prosthetics and character transformation effects, drew critical attention. The film was nominated for Best Makeup at the 2020 AMVCAs.
King of Boys to The Milkmaid: Range Across Genres
The years between 2018 and 2022 demonstrated the range of what he could do across very different kinds of productions. Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020), Funke Akindele’s high-energy urban comedy-drama, required practical effects and makeup that served a completely different tonal register from the political intensity of King of Boys. The Milkmaid (2020), Desmond Ovbiagele’s quiet, devastating film set against the insurgency in Nigeria’s north, required something else again: makeup that communicated poverty, violence, and displacement with restraint rather than spectacle.
The Milkmaid won four awards at the 2020 AMAA, including Achievement in Makeup, a win he shared with Rahila Manga. The film had also been selected as Nigeria’s official submission for the Academy Awards. His work on it had to serve a very specific kind of realism, one that the film’s critical reception confirmed had landed. The same year, King of Boys: The Return of the King brought him back to Adetiba’s world in a supervisory capacity, extending his involvement with the franchise that had first announced him.
In 2022, Anikulapo, Kunle Afolayan’s mythological Netflix film set in Yorubaland, presented perhaps his most visually demanding assignment to that point. The film’s central character of a two-headed boy became a subject of public discussion across Nigeria, with audiences questioning whether what they were seeing was real. His contributions to Anikulapo earned him an AMAA nomination for Best Makeup in 2023.
Jagun Jagun
Jagun Jagun was directed by Tope Adebayo and Adebayo Tijani, produced by Femi Adebayo for Euphoria 360 Media. It is a historical Yoruba epic set in a world of mercenary warlords, warrior women, and supernatural forces. Hakeem Effects was called in by Adebayo specifically because, as he told Punch in a 2023 interview, Adebayo told him he was the one who could do a good job on it. On set, he encountered resistance from directors and others who wanted to direct his process. Adebayo intervened and gave him space to think and execute. The result was the film’s most discussed technical achievement.
After the film’s release, he shared a video showing the process behind creating ‘Gbogunmi,’ the character played by Itele D’Icon, who had a scar across the upper part of his face and whose appearance became one of the production’s most memorable visual elements.
The Black Book’s Old Scores and the Creek Problem
The most dangerous assignment he had taken by his own account was not Jagun Jagun but The Black Book: Old Scores, the sequel to Editi Effiong’s globally successful 2023 thriller. He described it to Backstage Africa as a production with extensive pyrotechnics, explosions, and battle scenes filmed inside creek and river environments. As he explained, water and pyrotechnics are not a natural combination. The team had to submerge in the water to plant and test the effects before detonating them. The combination of outdoor conditions, water, and precise timing made it, he said, the most dangerous production he had ever worked on.
The Punch interview of June 2026 with journalist Temitope Adetunji captured his reflection on that project and on the broader state of set safety in Nigeria. He described a near-miss early in his career when a rig misfired due to a sudden change in wind direction. No one was injured, but he said the experience permanently changed his approach. Since then, every project begins with safety briefings, test runs, fire marshals on standby, and clearly defined emergency stop signals. “Safety over shot” is his operating principle.
He has consistently argued in interviews that behind-the-scenes professionals in Nigerian cinema were not being adequately credited or recognised, a situation he believes has begun to shift as streaming platforms have raised audience expectations and younger industry voices have started pulling attention toward the people making things happen off camera.
Seven Doors, Lisabi, and the Continuing Arc
Seven Doors (2024), Femi Adebayo’s Netflix limited series, brought him back into collaboration with the producer who had championed him on Jagun Jagun. His work on King Adejuwon’s character, played by Kolawole Ajeyemi, was cited in reviews as particularly effective in building the series’ atmosphere of dread and historical weight. Femi Adebayo, speaking on Channels TV’s Morning Brief during the series’ promotional period, was asked about certain scenes and responded: “Hakeem Effects is a fantastic guy. The guy is a genius. Hakeem is an asset to the nation that needs to be celebrated, and the fantastic thing is that he did not go to school to learn it.”
Lisabi: The Uprising (2024), also produced by Femi Adebayo, extended their creative relationship into Yoruba historical epic territory again. His work on the production earned him the AMVCA Best Makeup award in 2026, adding to a tally that by that point included multiple AMAA and AMVCA wins across a decade of consistently recognised work.
Behind the Scenes and the Prosthetic That Had to Be a Person
Behind the Scenes (2025), co-directed by Funke Akindele and Tunde Olaoye and written by Akindele, Collins Okoh, and Uche Mordi, was released in cinemas on December 12, 2025, under Funke Ayotunde Akindele Network (FAAN) and distributed by FilmOne. It subsequently streamed on Netflix Africa and KAVA internationally.
The film follows Aderonke Faniran, a wealthy, generous woman living with lupus, whose family drains her until she reaches a breaking point. Its central structural device is that the protagonist dies partway through the story and observes subsequent events as an unseen presence, watching from what the title calls the behind the scenes. For that device to work on screen, another character had to present evidence of the death in a form that other characters, and the audience, would accept. The evidence was a hyper-realistic full prosthetic of the protagonist’s body. It had to function within the story world as an actual corpse. Characters reacted to it as one. The audience had to receive it as one.
That prosthetic was Hakeem Effects’ work which operated as a diegetic prop: an object that exists and carries narrative function within the world of the film, rather than a background visual effect. It was not decorative. The story’s credibility at its most critical point depended on whether it held.
He also handled the physical progression of the lupus illness on the protagonist’s appearance across the film’s timeline, an assignment that required a different kind of precision, charting a believable deterioration through makeup and effects across scenes.
Funke Akindele acknowledged his contribution publicly on X following the film’s streaming release, writing:
“People see the final look on screen, but the truth is the makeup effects take months of planning even before the cameras start rolling. That level of dedication is part of what makes Behind the Scenes so remarkable. Big shoutout to @hakeemeffect, the man with the magic touch, for delivering excellence.”
His current credits include Lady (2026), Ìyálóde (2025), Orí Rebirth (2025), Finding Me (2025), Sin (2025), Dara: A Port Harcourt Love Story (2025), Shanty Town (2023) and the upcoming Queen Idia: Wife. Mother. Warrior, which is currently in production. The breadth of the credits across genres, historical epics, supernatural dramas, romantic stories, and crime thrillers, reflects a specialist who has moved well beyond the niche category of gore and battle effects into something more comprehensively embedded in how Nigerian cinema looks.
The Architecture Behind the Illusion
Through Tricks International, the special effects and prosthetics company he founded as CEO, he now leads a team of around thirty people. The company’s motto, “Stretching your imagination,” is a precise description of the function he has performed in the industry for more than two decades. In an interview with BellaNaija, he described the transformation that special effects requires as starting from the writer’s perspective: understanding what the script is asking an audience to believe, and then building the physical reality that makes that belief possible.
He has spoken repeatedly about the structural challenges that shaped his early career: the non-availability of materials, the need to improvise and self-manufacture supplies for eleven years before proper professional materials became accessible in Nigeria, and the debt he owes to the founding of the SFX store by Lola Maja-Okojevoh, which began to close the materials gap that had constrained the industry. He has also spoken about the misunderstanding he still encounters, the assumption that special effects is “magic” or “juju” rather than a discipline rooted in chemistry, physics, safety protocols, and sustained experimentation.
His educational position is one he discusses without embarrassment. Of all his siblings, he was the only one who did not attend a university. As he has said in multiple interviews, he disagrees with having a degree but agrees with being educated. His education has been the work itself: the experiments, the failures, the fourteen years of observation before the name became established, and the two decades of production that have followed.
The Story So Far
Today Hakeem Effects Onilogbo Ajibola is the highest-profile special effects makeup artist in Nigeria. What the record of Hakeem Onilogbo’s career documents, across more than two decades of production, is a practitioner who entered the industry with no formal training, no professional materials, and no institutional backing, and built a body of work that spans the most commercially successful and the most critically recognised productions in contemporary Nollywood.
The name; Hakeem Effects came from a producer who needed to tell two people apart on a film set. The company came from the need to fill a gap the industry had not filled. The awards came from other people finally submitting the work that had been sitting in front of them for years. What was always there, by his own account and by the evidence of the filmography, was the work itself. His story so far is, in many ways, still in the middle of being written.
