By Emma Ujah,  Abuja Bureau Chief
When he assumed office about three months ago, the Ag Director-General of the Nigeria Television Authority, NTA, Alhaji Musa Mayaki, was confronted with a plethora of challenges. In this interview with journalists in Abuja, he said that in just about three months, 10 stations have returned to air.

Excerpts:

You became acting Director-General, Nigeria Television Authority, NTA, few months ago. What did you meet on ground and what have you been doing differently?

Well, what I met on ground on assuming office was a network that was actually not there. We had a number of stations that were down within the network such that it was impacting negatively even on our revenue.

This is because when advertisers say they want their adverts on network, they monitor and they tell you that this station or the other station did not join or were not on, and that they were not going to pay for it. Really when you come to think of it, they are actually paying for the network. So there were so many stations that were not on board.

We were just calling ourselves ‘Africa’s largest network’ when in actual fact the network was collapsing gradually. So that was the first thing I tried to address. To date, we have brought up about 10 stations. One, Oshogbo was down, Oshogbo is now on. NTA Lafia was down, it is now up. The only thing we need to do at NTA Lafia is to connect it to the national grid because they are still using generators.  Then, NTA Ife that was down for more than three years or so is up now.

Alhaji Musa Mayaki, Ag DG,Nigeria Television Authority, NTA

We are getting full signals. In fact, you can get NTA Ife in any part of Osun State. Ijebu Ode is also up now. Ijebu Ode used to be a very key station in Ogun State because Abeokuta had a problem of visibility, so to say, because of the hills blocking the signals.

So we had a complimentary station in Ijebu Ode that was making all the money for us. It was also down, but we have been able to bring it up. It was down for more than one year, but now they are happy.  Takum was also down but the station is up now. Takum is also very strategic because of Nigerians living near the borders with Cameroon. We don’t want them to be receiving signals from Cameroon and not from Nigeria. We don’t want them to loose their identity as Nigerians.  Again NTA Sapele was down too. Now it is up. Also Iruekpe in Edo state was down. The House of Representatives member from there kept calling me. During our budget defence at the National Assembly, he asked me to tell them when the Iruekpe station would come up. We are happy now that the station is up.

There were so many stations that we had to battle with.

That is what we have been doing in the past three months.

It is not enough that the stations are up, what about content? 

That is the next stage we are now going to. This is because we said if we have clear signals, the screen is clean and we don’t have anything good to put on, we have nothing. This is because nobody is going to watch us and we would lose revenue.

We need to invest on content; that is where we are going now. It’s a very expensive venture, but we have to do it.

If we are to remain relevant in the industry, we have to tackle the issue of content.

The challenge is becoming more and more complex because we have gone to Startimes, apart from our regular stations of NTA News 24, NTA International and NTA Abuja.  And many more stations have set up channels on the Startimes cable platform. Channels like NTA Entertainment and NTA Knowledge need content.

In a short while we are opening up NTA Language Channel that would broadcast in Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba. All these demand content, because you cannot just open them up without showing anything or keep on repeating the same programme over and over.

So, how are you tackling the challenge of content and programming?

You know that television is a quarterly affair. Programmes are designed on quarterly basis. So in the next quarter, which begins from the first Monday of October you will notice gradual changes in our programming content. We cannot do anything right now because all the programmes we have now have already been done. We are looking to whatever changes in programming from October to December.

I have just deployed one of our seasoned producers from Lagos on account of this. He was the General Manager NTA Plus then. He turned NTA Plus from a revenue guzzling station to an outfit contributing large sums of money to the Authority. So I have brought him in now to come and help me bring up these channels.

When you speak of Ibo Hausa and Yoruba languages in your language channel, one wonders how useful it would be for other ethnic groups in the country?

The good thing here is that we have state stations nationwide. In fact, we have about 100 stations in the network. We have community stations. Community stations are supposed to broadcast purely in the local language because we cannot bring over 250 languages on board at the network here.

That is why the community stations were set up – to do programming and read news in local languages.  We also have state stations that devote certain percentage of their airtime to the local language.

Even our network news, they are supposed to be translated and then re-broadcast. These ones we are doing now would actually be commercialised because we want them to make money and not operate on a kind of public system.

Many Nigerians now prefer to tune to other private television stations, instead of the NTA. What are you doing to regain their confidence?

Well, you know that we are a public broadcast station. We cannot shy away from that really. What other private media can just say publicly, if we do that we would be causing a lot of confusion in the country. So we are very mindful of that, which is what the public does not want.  The public wants us to start attacking leaders by calling them names. That is when they would say ‘yes, this station has changed.’  But we cannot descend to that level. NTA is still the most quoted television by any network that is not domiciled in the country.  We have that credibility in the international community. We cannot do it differently from what we are doing right now. We are very mindful of the political situation in the country. We will not exacerbate any problem. Rather, we try to douse the tension.

A specific incident here is how NTA covered the DANA air crash incident recently.

Yes! As a matter of fact, that particular incident of Dana plane crash was my saddest moment, especially in terms of my duties. The reason is that we have equipment that we can use to report live from anywhere. We call it TVU pack. When the crash occurred, I called Lagos station to use the TVU pack to report it live because we wanted to get live pictures of the incident.  However, the station gave an excuse that the TVU battery had not been charged.

They had locked up the pack in the store and so the battery was down. They said also that they did not buy credits to recharge the pack. I asked them how much was the credit, and they said it was N15,000.  They told me that the major thing was that the battery had packed up and that it would take almost the whole day to charge it. So what they did was to go and take still photographs. This should have made our station different because we would be reporting every second, and our viewers would be able know what was happening. Nigerians would have been able to know how the emergency rescue services were coping with the situation and even how the hospitals were responding to the situation.

Then they will know that you are coming up with an innovation and every station will tune up to you.

Even when the pictures were sent at about 9pm, it was too dark for us to see. The following day, I was so infuriated over the disappointment that I insisted that somebody must be punished for it. We have the pack all over the country, but not every station has it. That is really where my regret came from.  So if you say some stations beat us to it, yes. If you say some stations had clearer pictures, I will agree because it is indefensible really. But we have since put our house in order.