The hope of residents of Ilorin, Kwara State and some other states of the federation covering the North-Central geopolitical zone to enjoy the newly installed Digital Switch Over (DSO) equipment may be dashed due to the quality of the equipment at the Ilorin zone.
Some concerned broadcast engineers who saw the equipment at the Ganmo NTA station described them as obsolete and brought it to public attention. Thus, television viewers are worried.
The digital equipment, installed by a Chinese company, the signal distributor, was reportedly purchased in 1999. It has also been reported that the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) paid the Chinese company about N1.7 billion for the project.
If the equipment is not quickly replaced, it might frustrate the good intention of the current administration to make the zone to meet June deadline for International Telecomes Union (ITU) to switch over from analogue to digital.
The shoddy installation was blown open a few weeks ago when the NBC Director General, Is’haq Moddibo Kawu, who hails from Ilorin, led other management team to inaugurate the NTA Ilorin Digital project.
The NBC had earlier assured Nigerians that the next move was to simultaneously switch on six states drawn from the geopolitical zones in the country.
The switch on digital TV broadcasting in Abuja signalled the gradual disconnect of the analogue broadcasting in Nigeria, a scheme most Nigerians do not have much knowledge about yet.
Disturbed by this development, we are calling on the DG, who is a stakeholder in the project and a highly-respected broadcaster and the information Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, to urgently call the company handling the project to replace the substandard equipment so that the people of the state and the entire zone shall not be robbed of not benefiting from the Digital Switch Over (DSO).
Abdulmalik Oladejo
Baboko, Ilorin.
and then