THE National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has said that, as at March this year, some broadcasting stations in the country are owing the commission about N5 billion as licensing fees.
Speaking with journalists in Ilorin on Tuesday, the director general of the NBC, Mallam Isiaq Modibbo Kawu, disclosed plans by the commission to sanction broadcasting stations that had failed to meet their financial obligations to it.
He traced the development to the way previous administrations allowed politicians to pressure the commission from enforcing payment of licensing fees, adding that one individual alone currently owed the commission about N750 million.
“They owe us a lot of money, about N5 billion. They are negotiating with us along with the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON) and we have given them a three month grace because our patience is not limitless. It will get to a time when we will have to close many stations in Nigeria, not because of what they say but for not paying our fees. But I would like to remind our colleagues that every radio and television licence is actually a provisional licence; meaning that it can be withdrawn any moment, nobody owns a licence permanently”, he said.
Mallam Kawu also raised the alarm over subversive broadcasting coming into Nigeria from outside the country, saying that the agency was facing a major hurdle in regulating such subversive broadcast.
He cited the example of a television station being run by the pro-Biafra group, IPOB which is being broadcast from outside Nigeria and which the commission has so far been unable to trace and block.
The NBC boss also raised the alarm over the importation of mobile transmitters into the country which he said are often hidden in suitcases because of their sizes to deceive security operatives.
Kawu, who lamented the high rate of hate speech currently on several airwaves, blamed the trend on erosion of professional values among broadcasters and the removal of history from the curriculum of Nigerian schools which has raised a lot of young people who are ignorant about the past.
“We face a major difficulty in trying to regulate what people broadcast; most people on air think that the more outlandish claim they make on air the more popular they become. Radio is such a responsible medium that should not be abused.
“Another problem we face is the use of the airwaves of Nigeria for subversive activities. For instance, Biafra radio they hop around, we were jamming some of the frequencies because we have the facilities to do so, but then there is a lot of mobile transmitters that are being brought into the country. Even people in government, even people in security might not understand that these are mobile transmitters because they can be inside a suitcase and people are using it to say all kinds of things.
“Last week I was in the office of the Inspector General of Police and they had a TV screen and what was being broadcast was Biafra TV; they were saying some of the most outlandish things, they were showing videos from the 1960s, and they were abusing everyone. Now this is happening and they were asking us (NBC) and they would ask us, because our duty is to monitor and regulate such but it was not coming from within Nigeria; it was from Satellite. Our engineers have been making contacts with the international satellite organisation that does broadcast to Africa about the fact that you cannot allow subversive broadcast into Nigeria from other part of the world.
“Last June Boko Haram was starting a new radio station, in think on 91.00 megahertz on the FM band from the border between Nigeria and the Republic of Cameroun and so it was our duty to inform the security organisations that it was happening so they could take it up and which they did eventually,” he stated.
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