PART A: HISTORY
From an historical perspective, radio broadcasting in Nigeria dates back to 1932. For two decades after its founding, as the local repeater station of the empire Service for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), radio broadcasting served, merely, as a hand maiden of the colonial enterprise, being the cultural arm of a political and economic process that consolidated British rule on our shores. All that changed in 1957 with the birth of the Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation [NBC]. In theory the NBC, unlike its predecessor, the Nigeria Broadcasting Service, NBS, was created to be an independent institution designed to be neutral of existing political forces on the ground and to treat all parties equally. In practice, however, that dream was never realized. Four years after it was created, just to demonstrate how unwilling the then government was to the notion of independence in the broadcast environment, the central government went to parliament in 1961 to use its majority to transform, through legislation, the independent NBC to a federal government mouth-piece.
Naturally, the philosophical foundations that gave expression to early radio broadcasting in Nigeria was unabashedly centralist and unmistakably monopolistic. The ethos was designed to serve the governance goals of a regime that was not only colonial but was typically disdainful of true democratic demands in policy formulation and implementation. It made all good sense therefore that a strong wave of agitation from the regions would counter-pose an agenda of liberalization of the airwaves against the monopoly of the central government.
Since the Nigeria Broadcasting Service, NBS, which was created in 1952 made no illusions to being independent, indeed it was a governmental department, and it was not so surprising that it became the target of relentless political agitation from local and regional leaders who felt the NBS was not giving fair and adequate coverage to the activities of their regions. The statutory and policy framework that came to redress the problem was the 1951 McPherson constitution which paved the paths for regional broadcasting. Between 1959 when the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service (WNBS), was set up, followed by the Eastern Nigeria Broadcasting service (ENBS) in 1960, and the Broadcasting Corporation of Northern Nigeria (BCNN) in 1962, the Second Age of radio in Nigeria became fully consolidated. The trajectory, however, in political sequence, represented mere shifts along the same policy orientation: from the colonial, through a central to regional forms of control. Radio broadcasting, conceived at that phase, remained within the mega-structure of a political conclave that was designed and defined to primarily serve elite political, social, and economic goals.
Military incursion into the Nigerian political scene in 1966 added a new problematic to the orientation of radio. On a statistical basis, it led to the proliferation of more radio stations. Since the representation of the nation’s political structure ballooned from four regional governments in 1963 to a 12 - state structure in 1967 [Yakubu Gowon’s administration]; 19 in 1976 [Murtala/Obasanjo]; 21 in 1987 [Babangida]; 30 in 1991 [Babangida] and 36 in 1996 [Abacha], the central paradigm in the broadcast environment was indiscriminate sowing of transmitters on the whole geographical landscape. Whereas there were only 23 radio transmitters in the first two decades of radio broadcasting in Nigeria, the number had climbed to 32 in the five-year timeline between 1979 and 1983. This ubiquitous status of radio did not, however, translate to autonomy of action or far reaching grassroot power for the stations, although successive governments at the state and central level tended to advertise them so. The reality of military rule, as a matter of fact, destroyed the limited autonomy that had existed by bringing, in a command-type arrangement, the power of states and their broadcast aspirations, under the centralizing imperative of an over - bearing federal vision.
In the sense of a political typology of radio therefore, the first age of radio spanning the quarter of a century period of 1932 to 1957, and the second age of radio from 1957 to 1979 is best characterized as the period of the emergence and consolidation of state radio. Although this typology of radio is frequently mischaracterized as public radio, the semantic play represents the ideological challenge of an elite that sought to universalize and homogenize its identity as the dominant and essential identity of the nation. In their true expression, public radios ought to fall under the strict policy and fiduciary oversight of parliament and not that of the executive; their governance structures ought to be transparently independent and they could not, operationally, under a multiparty political arrangement, claim to advance the ethos and vision of a ruling party at the expense of the opposition as it is the case in the successive Nigerian democratic experiments.
Section 36 (2) of the 1979 Constitution ushered in the third revolution in radio broadcasting in the country. By proclaiming that “the federal and state government or any other person or body authorized by the president can own, establish or operate a television or wireless broadcasting station in the country”, it gave statutory basis to the ultimate emergence of private/commercial radio broadcasting 13 years after, when in 1992, the then government of Ibrahim Babangida finally, through the creation of the National Broadcasting Commission, decreed into existence a new era for private broadcasting. A year after, the first set of licences was handed out. It is noteworthy to recall that in 1987 when the National Conference on a National Mass Communication Policy met in Badagry, it recommended that private licences be issued to interested Nigerians. The government rejected that recommendation. A government official summed up the thinking in the administration thus in a 1989 statement: “This call (for private participation in broadcasting) is not well advised. It appear
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