The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, gets a Board at last. That is good news. There have been tons of materials written on the need for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to set up a Board for the regulatory agency which has its functions cast in the Act of the Commission to initiate policies that can shape the […]

When the article, ‘Don’t let 9Mobile die’, was published in February 2022, the service provider had nearly 13 million lines. It was struggling for life and had so many people wishing it well. It had commitments it could hardly meet and some of us thought it was better for relevant stakeholders to work for its survival […]

There is a side of the politician that we don’t readily credit, to our own disadvantage. The average politician believes he is God and everything moves at his word. He looks at the ordinary fella with imperial arrogance and expects servile response to even his flatulence. He promotes arrogance and ignorance over knowledge. He takes his […]

The playing field for pay-TVbusiness is about to change, not in the way we expected or are canvassing at the moment, but in a much more significant way. Competition will be more intense and competitors over-awed. Operators will square up for what is about to come, and the regulator of the broadcast industry will be more agile now than ever before. It […]

Just when you think you have seen it all, something happens to convince you very strongly that all that journey is a circlical movement which has not taken you far from the point of departure at all. Like peddling away on a stationary bicycle at a fitness centre. Or expending so much energy and achieving very […]

I have my respect for people who consign things to intellectual discourse in order to earn deserved results. They democratise contributions and provide ideas to flagellate intransigent presentations, myopia and even subterraneously sponsored positions in order to present a truth that renews the society. The Centre for Media and Society, CEMESO, provided such an opportunity last […]

I wasn’t rooting for Chelsea to win the Club World Cup Quarter Final game against Palmeiras. Not me. It wasn’t just because my daughter supports every Brazilian team with the belief that Brazilian footballers are very good, using Neymar as an example, which carries some truth; but for other personal reasons.  Chelsea troubles Arsenal too much in […]

When we were children and worked in fresh farms with our parents, we didn’t understand the heroic story of the agama lizard and the tall palm tree somewhere in the farm. Once in a while, you were alerted to the base of the tree by the sound from the lizard which had just landed on its stomach […]

There is something that age does to a man. It doesn’t just equip him with more rags than the Millennials, the Gen-Z or the Generation Alpha, as Chinua Achebe would have loved to put it in one of the greatest books ever, Things Fall Apart; age slows down a man and tempers his views with ancient […]

Major Pay-TV service provider, MultiChoice, is in a situation that needs careful understanding and sorting without emotional recriminations. The fortunes are plummeting and that is not a good testimony for a business that was for a time a valued corporate ambassador for the nation’s business ecosystem. Fortunately, it is not all gloom. As they say, […]

There is something they say about digging yourself into a hole. It usually takes more  time to claw your way back. That is, if you ever want to see light again.  The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, did not intentionally dig itself into a hole. Some people, given the responsibility to curate the day-to-day operations of the […]

The news last week that the Federal Government is seemingly finalising plans to put the Digital Switchover, DSO, on an accelerator that can immediately take it to about 10 million people, was very elevating and, for me, it marks a good turn for the Tinubu administration.  The story which has been in gestation but only broke […]

The directive by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, that telecom operators should pay compensation to their subscribers for prolonged network outages and also report such outages on the Commission’s Major Outage Reporting Portal, is a good one which aligns completely with the transparency garb the Commission has adorned over a time.  “By providing consumers and stakeholders […]

I had no prior information that the Kano State Government sought help from the NBC before coming up with a landmark decision on live political broadcast early in the month. But my source at the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC, said there was  indeed a stakeholders meeting on broadcasting early this year where the regulator, government and […]

The journey started in the bank and ended in the rain. Just a little transaction that demands your presence in the bank in one of those rare moments, since everything now comes at the press of a button, there was an indeterminate network downtime. So, you simply stay in the bank waiting for a miracle to […]