By Muktar Tahir
Hitherto the advent, adoption and transition into the digital era, the country’s broadcast regulator, National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) literally patrol the broadcast airwaves day-and-night to ensure that broadcasting and broadcast materials are aired in accordance with the best ethical, professional and legal standards, and the breach of which is severely punished.
Rather than regulating the activities of the broadcast channels and stations, the commission now has to regulate, by way of supervising, the multifaceted channels showing on various platforms and formats. Regrettably, by this development, broadcasters could easily skedaddle their way out of the NBC’s punitive net.
Therefore, at this era of digital media convergence, made possible by the digital technology, broadcast regulator would rather have to assume an amorphous role and is left with no other definite option than that of harmonization of other complementing digital broadcast indices.
However, the stupendous paper which the Director General of the NBC, Mal. Ishaq Modibbo Kawu presented, titled: ‘Content Publishing in the Digital Era: The role of the Regulator’, at the recently concluded international summit on ‘Content Management for Digital Broadcasting and Media’, which took place in Accra, Ghana, lend a lot of credence to the daunting energies daily being dissipated towards ensuring that the digital transition did not only come to pass, but also the socio-economic impact the process could ingrain in our populace is guaranteed, and content security is at the fore front.
The 2-day Summit brought together broadcasters, media owners, content publishers, advertisers, regulators and other industry stakeholders to review and evaluate the roles and responsibilities of various industry stakeholders across Africa and beyond.
Quoting directly from the DG’s speech, which I got from the NBC’s website, Kawu said:
“This requires fair and balanced business and regulatory relations between all stakeholders to tackle the issues at their level and drive towards a common goal of a capable network which avoids the bottleneck, enforces copyrights and provides the ambience for an appropriate return on investments for all parties in the ecosystem.
“In Nigeria, the NBC is closely monitoring all the critical elements in building the digital economy which is essential to our country’s youth. We are contributing as the gate keeper of the broadcast industry, by ensuring that we fulfill our responsibility of ensuring that through Broadcasting, every Nigerian is able to partake in the exchange of ideas and experiences that will enrich his or her life and help him or her live in a complex, dynamic and humane society.”
Another way of ensuring content security was the decision the commission, in consultation with the ministry of Information and culture, made that 70 percent of content on all the television stations in our multiplexes would be local.
He said: “In Nigeria’s DSO process, we have adopted 100 percent local content policy in that all the channels on our national Free TV platform are local. Similarly, a decision has also been taken to ensure that! This is to provide the platform for Nigerian talent and the bourgeoning of opportunities for the largest content creation pool on the African continent, to find the platforms of expression; as well as the creation of jobs right through the television value chain in our country.”
Content security and affordability of digital technology put together birthed the decision to manufacture the Set Top Boxes at home. “For that purpose, we licensed thirteen manufacturers, who have installed production lines at various stages and are committed to the employment of young Nigerians as well as the acquisition of the technology of Set Top Boxes productions and eventually, various add-ons, like television, tablets and handsets for mobile telephony.
“Our Set Top Boxes are fitted with middleware, security systems and so on, in order to discourage the importation of boxes that would kill the nascent Set Top Boxes industry in Nigeria. Similarly, our Signal Distributors are mobilizing resources for the procurement of the huge numbers of digital transmitters that would be the backbone of the DSO in our country.”
At the tail-end of the DG’s speech, he echoed on some of the strategic programs the commission, under his watch, undertook towards ensuring that content generation and protection remain superbly at the pinnacle of the country’s digital transition agenda. “Because of the importance we attach to the place of Content in the Digital Broadcasting ecosystem, in 2016, we held three national content financing workshops in Lagos, Enugu and Kano. We are also working towards the creation of a National Content Development Fund, which will be dedicated to the financing of content in the context of Nigeria’s DSO,” he said.
On the final analysis, I think African countries that are yet to totally migrate need to borrow a leaf from Nigeria’s digital transmission success stories. I guess one may want to ask, ‘what is so big a deal about these success stories’, and the apt answer for this question is for that fellow to look at the collateral evidences on the progress made so far – Jos and Abuja experiences, as well as the I-can-do spirit innate in our broadcast policy-makers and regulators speaks volumes about that.
Tahir, who is a media expert, wrote from Abuja.
