A former director-general of the Nigeria Television Authority, Prof. Tonnie Iredia, has berated the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed for hijacking the job of the NBC regulator, advising him to allow the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to perform its regulatory functions as stipulated in the law that established it.
Iredia, who made the remark on Channels Television’s breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily, noted that the minister is a politician and not a regulator, and therefore should allow the broadcasters in the NBC to do their professional duty.
The former DG was reacting to the minister’s announcement of new fine for hate speech from N500,000 to N5million and the controversies trailing the new fine.
Iredia said the NBC should be an autonomous body that has no place in politics and should not be hijacked by politicians.
“Everybody expects a broadcasting commission to be an autonomous body that has no place in politics. If you listen to the news, who has been speaking? the Minister of Information. Is he the Director-General of the NBC?
“When the minister is speaking, there is no way broadcasters can see that the regulator is speaking. He is not a regulator. He should leave the broadcasters in the NBC to do their professional duty. The law gives him the right to supervise but not to take over the job.
“The moment the minister is speaking, no matter how well-intentioned he may be, the people become suspicious because he belongs to a political divide and whatever he says is likely to be used against the opposition and I think this is a natural thing.”
The professor noted that the NBC just rolled out a number of things that it felt should be in the code without consultations with the stakeholders and expressed concern that the code be subject to abuse.
He said: “Now, the problem is that for the first time in the history of broadcasting in this country, the code was not done the way it used to be done. This time around, the NBC just rolled out a number of things that it felt should be in the code and did not hold consultations with the stakeholders like the previous managers of the system did where you first of all hold consultation, everybody will look at it, there will be a document, you will bring it out at the tail end, there will still be another kind of peer review and all kinds of things.
Iredia added: “Now take the issue of fake news that has been overplayed in the last couple of weeks. We were all in this country a few days ago when a minister told the nation that contracts in the NDDC were being grabbed by legislators. The legislators now challenged him to bring a list. The next thing the minister said was that he didn’t say so.”