IT News Nigeria:
- Stakeholders say there had never been a time when a presidential approval was needed for a review of the broadcasting code
- Top management of NBC choose not to listen to stakeholders
- Stakeholders were shut out during the amendment
Acting director-general National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has said alleged that a stakeholder, who is a foreign company, was behind the campaign against the amended code of the regulator.
Stakeholders have said there had never been a time in the history, tradition and conventions of the NBC when a presidential approval was needed for a review of the broadcasting code. And they wondered why top management of NBC would choose not to listen to stakeholders who were shut out during the amendment.
Mr Amstrong Idachaba said this while reacting to disagreement between NBC Management and the Board resulting from amended broadcast code.
He noted that the commission “carried all the stakeholders along during the amendment’’ , adding that the company was kicking against the code because it erroneously believed that it would weaken its monopoly and brought Nigerian companies up to the same level as it.
“This is not so. Rather it would even give them more reach and more money”, he said.
The board of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has insisted the controversial sixth edition of the Nigerian Broadcasting Code must be reviewed.
Communicationsweek reports that the board had penultimate Friday placed advertisements in some national newspapers calling on aggrieved stakeholders in the broadcasting and entertainment industries to submit position papers on the amended code, according to Daily Trust.
But the NBC, in another advert signed by its acting Director-General, last Monday, had asked Nigerians to disregard the earlier one put out by the board.
However, Ikra Aliyu Bilbis, chairman, NBC board, told journalists in Abuja that it was wrong for the NBC’s top management staff to say the advert placed by the board had no official endorsement of the commission.
Bilbis, who alleged that some ministry officials were setting the NBC’s top management staff against the commission’s board, said protocols were being breached by the officials in their oversight of the broadcast regulatory agency.
He said as much the board agreed that Section 6 of the NBC Act conferred on the minister the power to give directives of a general character to the commission, the Act “however does not infer that the honourable minister can substitute the board by usurping the functions of the same board.”
He said there had never been a time in the history, tradition and conventions of the NBC when a presidential approval was needed for a review of the broadcasting code. He wondered why top management of NBC would choose not to listen to stakeholders who were shut out during the amendment.
