By Braeyi Ekiye

CEREBRAL Tony Iredia, former Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, and one-time spokesperson of INEC, now a professor, came hard on the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC, on Monday, July 10, 2022. Incensed by what he thought was government’s overbearing influence on the Commission’s management on the discharge of its regulatory functions, Iredia expressed his disgust for the establishment during a primetime interview at ARISE TV morning show. 

The National Broadcasting Commission was established with the objectives of promoting fair, efficient and effective competition and to regulate the acquisition and sharing of content rights in the broadcast industry. The said contentious articles in the amended sixth edition of the NBC Code which especially examines the relevant provisions of the Code on the subject matters of exclusivity, compulsory sub-licensing, sports rights and the constitutional concerns have raised the current fierce criticism of the Commission from both broadcast practitioners and others in related fields.

Iredia sees these amended provisions in the NBC Code as gagging or strangulating the media professionals and warned that such moves negate the real essence of media practice and effective service delivery to the viewing and listening publics. 

Professor Iredia, therefore, called for self-regulation of the media in Nigeria. He argued that if the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, and the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA could be allowed to regulate their practising members, what stopped the media professionals from self-regulation.

According to Iredia, with self-regulation, the media professionals would be offered the opportunity to grow in the industry and in the process, formulate guidelines and principles and regulations that would best suit the media in line with their professional ethics and laws. Iredia further argued that it would be counter-productive if non-professionals or experts are allowed to regulate the experts already in this media, adding that the media does not need, what he described as an outsider to show them the ethics and laws of the profession.

From the distaste expressed in his reaction, one can safely say that the revered broadcaster, writer and academic is suspicious of NBC being tele-guided from above. In a suppressed feat of anger, Iredia said: “The National Broadcasting Commission should not be answerable to government and should remain so”. 

Agreed that governments have a point in the area of national security and other editorial and communication content bordering on patriotism, the laws regulating broadcast practice are sufficient to invoke against any offender in our law courts. So, NBC’s intervention on the grounds stated above are not good and proper reasons to strangulate the broadcast industry with such toxic policies and laws. This draconian approach by the NBC in its regulatory functions smacks of intolerance for freedom of speech and expression through the variegated avenues open to broadcasters in the broadcast media.

The current battle of supremacy between the NBC and the broadcast media operators reminds one of the show of strength and authority between the military regime and the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria, NPAN, in 1978 during General Olusegun Obasanjo’s supreme leadership as military head of state.

Speaking to supreme power on the then offensive Press Council Decree at its general annual meeting in Kaduna on September 14, 1978, the Chairman of NPAN, the revered doyen of Nigerian Journalism and one of its best, the late Lateef Jakande had knocked the then Press Council Decree out of joints, rendering it helpless and gasping for breath and totally disarmed its ill-conceived mission to administer penalties to defaulters of the obnoxious Decree.

Jakande had said then that the point at issue was very fundamental in the sense that a press council is not, and should not be a disciplinary council. The purpose of a press council all over the world, he reminded the then military regime, is to provide a complaints forum for the general public so as to check any abuse by the press which may be actionable in a court of law or in which the offender may be willing or unable to take to court. It is for this reason, he said, that the Council is generally composed of both professionals and laymen so that the complaining public may have confidence in its findings.

Jakande stated that the disciplinary council for any profession is a purely professional body which is established to discipline members of the profession concerned and does not include members of the other professions. Only a body of professionals, he opined, is competent to discipline its members. He argued that if what the Decree wanted was a Disciplinary Council for journalists, then the composition of the council as set in Section 3 of the then Decree should be amended to exclude all non-journalists. He reminded the then military junta that there was no journalist or journalists on the Nigerian Medical Council, same as in the Council of Registered Engineers and the Nigerian Bar Association in their disciplinary councils. 

In concluding his address, Chief Jakande asked these pertinent and vexing questions: Why should we have a lawyer on a Disciplinary Council for Journalists? Or why for that matter, should a public relations or an advertising practitioner or three representatives of the general public, including, perhaps, a market woman, have a say in the disciplining of journalists by their professional colleagues.

Happily, these offensive articles or clauses in the amended sixth edition of the NBC Code of Conduct has since been challenged by Femi Davies, an actor known for Trigger Finger (2018) drama series in a Federal High Court in Lagos, presided over by Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa on May 26, 2022.

The trial judge held that the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission lacks the power to prohibit exclusivity on privately acquired intellectual property right in programme contents of a right holder. The court also set aside the proposed amendment to the sixth edition of the NBC Code for being ultra vires, incompetent, null and void, and perpetually restrained the Commission from implementing the said amended Code.

Hailing the judgement, a columnist in the Vanguard newspaper, Okoh Aihe felt relieved that the code has been trashed in court and for that reason, it can hardly be useful to the broadcast industry. Okoh said the humiliation suffered by NBC in court has no doubt, hamstrung the regulator and whittled down its capacity for regulation. Clearly, the NBC has shot far off the mark in its obligations to the broadcast media, going by its unimpressive, docile and lack-lustre performance of its regulatory functions to the broadcast media.

The NBC Act empowers the Commission to work with the industry to produce a Nigerian Broadcasting Code of Conduct that would guide operators in the Broadcast Industry. From recent developments, it is clear that the lack of consultation with its constituents and the unpardonable unilateral manner with which the NBC has carried out its regulatory functions leaves much to be desired. It is common place that the amended sixth edition of the Code virtually made it impossible for people to transact good business in broadcasting or for a broadcaster to source for premium content to boost market opportunities—a compelling imperative for financial, economic and infrastructural transformation of broadcast industry operators.

It is for these reasons that critical stakeholders in the industry have also lent their condemnation of the Code of Conduct of NBC as enshrined in its amended sixth edition. Among such commentators are the International Press Centre, the founder of Iroko TV, Jason Njoku, and Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, who described the Code as “Strangulation” rather than regulatory. That even the former Board, headed by Alhaji Ika Aliyu Bilbis rejected the version of the sixth Code on the grounds that it contained amendments that the Board was unaware of, to say the least, is unfortunate. The Bilbis Board declared the Code presented by the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed as unfit in the regulation of broadcasting in the country.

Bilbis further stated that the NBC Code had been publicly presented in 2019 in Kano without those amendments and alleged that the minister unilaterally implemented a review without consulting relevant stakeholders. Bilbis, who said he was speaking on behalf of the Board as well as  fifty-five  institutions and stakeholders, including the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria, BON, Independent Broadcast Association of Nigeria, IBAN, said the Board had received numerous letters conveying the rejection of the Minister’s version of the Code. The Board, therefore, said that the purported sixth Code review has no Board endorsement and, therefore, cannot be utilised in regulating broadcasting in Nigeria.

Meanwhile, a new Board headed by Balarabe Tielah has been inaugurated by the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed in April 2022. Inaugurating the Board, the Minister charged members to work decisively on the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting, through the Digital Switch Over, DSO, project. What is not known, however, is how the new Board would thinker with the largely rejected sixth edition of the Code. The new Board, should, however, be aware that, their inherited amended sixth edition of the NBC Code is a bone of serious contention; a code rendered unworkable by the court of competent jurisdiction and even more importantly, rejected by critical stakeholders in the broadcast and communication industry.

The new board certainly has a herculean task in reconstructing a largely discredited Commission whose regulatory capacity has been seriously challenged in very unsavoury terms. The Board, observers hope, would stand up tall and accountable to the Commission and not to the government in the discharge of her functions. The Commission should be conscious of its integrity deficit. In this regard, it is advisable that the independence of the Commission should not be sacrificed on the altar of Government’s undue control of its regulatory functions. That would guarantee the effective performance of its function as a regulatory body. That is the sure way for NBC’s regulatory capacity and power to dispense or communicate its functions as a regulatory body to the broadcast industry.

As pointed out by Okoh Aihe, the Vanguard columnist in his column on June 1, 2022, the bane of the regulatory agency, NBC is its wilful attack on market democracy in the broadcast industry. This, he said, has negatively affected the survival of broadcast institutions in the drive for economic, creative and communications enterprise. The NBC to my mind, needs to start working towards building trust between her and the local Broadcast Industry operators with a view to enhancing a symbiotic working relationship that will be mutually beneficial to both parties, and for a better service delivery to the various viewing and listening broadcast publics.

The times therefore, calls for the placement of sound professionals in the commanding heights of the National Broadcasting Commission, including its board, saddled with the onerous regulatory function of monitoring the broadcast industry to achieve professional integrity and excellence. Government, in collaboration with stakeholders in the industry should work to avoid the embarrassment and humiliation the NBC had suffered in recent times, for its lack of inclusivity, consultation and regard to due process.

Ekiye, publisher of EnvironmentWatch, wrote from Yenagoa, Bayelsa State.