Last night, my attention was drawn to an article making the rounds on social media, about how I, and some pretty powerful and influential persons are in some grand conspiracy to get a serving director general removed from office.
By the estimation of the said article, I am supposed to be working in concert with the very people who appointed the said director general to remove him. Normally, I’d let personal attacks slide, but these are not normal times. Nigeria today is already so polarized, awash with dangerous lies meant to justify and uphold impunity. For me it would be a costly luxury to indulge the type of falsehood contained in the article without deploying factual reason to vanquish it.
I served as DG of the National Broadcast Commission, NBC, between May 2013 and February 2016. During my tenure I was saddled with the onerous responsibility of ensuring Nigeria’s transition from analogue to digital broadcasting with a deadline set by the International Telecommunication Union, ITU for June 17th, 2015. Sadly, Nigeria is still in breach of that deadline in spite of our best efforts. The article in question is titled “The Modibbo Kawu ICPC Indictment: Shine Your Eyes,” and authored by one Abubarkar Mahoud Ahmed. There were over 20 mentions of my name with such intensely weird desperation to get some imagined atrocities stick to my name. To the point that the author sought to demonstrate that Vice President Yemi Osibajo, national leader of APC, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed and I have stuck in some conspiracy to unseat the current DG of NBC. Shouldn’t writers have the decorum to at least credit their readers with some measure of intelligence?
There are so many absurdities in the said article. Any self-respecting professional would not, after leaving an exalted position of service occupy himself with throwing pebbles and posting petitions against his successor. Maybe some retards who can’t find anything of worth to occupy themselves with could descend to such ignoble acts. Personally, I have my time in the courts against the EFCC and I don’t go about looking for who to accuse about that. I acknowledge that low lifers make such their pre-occupation and I do not rule out that this is what the author of this ignoble article finds himself in. I am certain that the ICPC have the mechanisms to determine who the author of the petitions with them is and indeed the person petitioned against also has the right to see who the petitioner is. I am not a bitter or vengeful person, and I would wager that people that I have worked with or relate with can testify to this. I have zero interest in going after anyone’s job.
Prior to Mr. Lai Mohammed’s appointment as Minister of Information in late 2015, I had never met the gentleman. Upon his appointment, as is customary, all parastatal chiefs Executive make it a point of duty to build positive working relationship with their supervising Minister. He was the supervising Minister to the agency I headed and it was within my remit to ensure that we had a good working relationship. That relationship, at no time amounted or translated to paying illicit funds anyone on Mohammed’s behalf or at his behest. Nevertheless, I believe Mohammed’s son and aide are better placed to answer to such allegations.
As a matter of records, there’s no way NBC during my tenure could fund any political party or person, not to talk of funding the political campaign of the incumbent president at that time. But I get the desperation by the writer to seek anyway at all, no matter how ridiculous, to dredge up the old fallacies that anyone linked with former President Jonathan or indeed his ruling party, the PDP, had odious quality. Besides that failed motive, is it not simple enough for individuals to ask themselves how much in all was NBC ever capable of generating in terms funds and how much it could normally take to fund a presidential campaign and make simple deductions as to the uselessness of such a claim. The license fee of N34 Billion from MTN came in August 2015. That was a clear four months after the 2015 general elections. The NBC account details are available for scrutiny and am sure that the EFCC did more than scrutinize those accounts. Not only did the EFCC scrutinize the NBC accounts, they also committed several months to scrutinizing my personal accounts.
The records of the proceedings of the licensing and the decision to appoint and license Inview Technology as the preferred middleware conditional access provider for the digital switch over are still available, as are my own records. If the payment to Inview for the DSO was deemed illegal, I believe that my successor at the NBC should have taken the appropriate actions to rectify the illegality. Yet more than three years down the road, the same framework is still in operation and is the basis of the success recorded so far, with regards to the analogue to digital switch over.
Preparatory to the ITU DSO deadline of June 2015, the NBC and Digiteam in May 2014, announced a public expression of interest in at least three Nigerian newspapers, the Federal Tender publications and via other international trade press for persons interested in applying for “type approval certification for the manufacture or dealership of DTT set top boxes.” This announcement was over a year before even the NBC was able to raise the N34billion for the DSO in August 2015. So, by some celestial magic, going by the claims of the article, I was able to encourage my friends and associates to set up shell companies in anticipation of “spending spree’ when no one had any ideas where the DSO funding would come from. By the way the selection of the STB manufacturers was an open process conducted by Digiteam, after which the selected companies paid NBC N50m each for the right to manufacture STB locally.
The author of the article, am sure knows that it does not serve his warped motives well to state what the DSO process was. The DSO budget was approved after rigorous arguments by two Ministers, Mr. Labaran Maku, Information Minister; and Mrs Omobola Johnson, Minister of Communication Technology. The minutes and documentations including the formula for calculating the subsidy rebate scheme as part of a mechanism to stimulate digital uptake and local manufacturing is detailed out in the relevant official documents. It was on the basis of certification of the process by the two Ministers that the presidential approval was obtained.
Today, I am proud that the decision to go the subsidy rebate route has led to the establishment of at least two world class STB and electronics manufacturing plants in Nigeria. One of which, Gospell SMT Ltd, incidentally owned by Sir Godfrey. The current DG of the NBC proudly participated at the commissioning ceremony in Calabar free trade zone way back in 2017. Today, the plant in Calabar is probably the largest electronics manufacturing plant in Nigeria. Sir Godfrey probably owes me, and both ministers for enlightened decision to stick to an industry policy decision which is yielding measurable impact to the Nigerian economy in terms of jobs and technology transfer. The author of the article actually pushed a collection of fables and bare faced lies and I don’t intend bothering myself with claims that I owned 100,000. If with the attention and energy that EFCC committed to investigating my tenure in NBC they still cannot point at any tangible wrongdoing I should not be wasting my time responding to wild claims from hacks like the author in question.
Let me say this perhaps for the first time publicly, the decision taken to license Pinnacle Communications Ltd was at great personal and professional risk to me, against the very clear directives of some very influential persons in government at that time. And yes, in order to ensure that the decision of the NBC and Digiteam stood regarding the licensing of Pinnancle, I did undertake a campaign to seek political cover for my decision to go ahead with the licensing of Sir Lucky Omuluwa’s Pinnacle Communication. Something for which I would later be accused of collecting millions from him to stand by the decision of the Commission. At no time during my tenure did I encourage others to treat any other licensee as a “leper.” The facts are abundant in several minutes of DSO contact team meetings which held regularly at Protea Hotel Asokoko, Abuja, even though Pinnacle and their agents boycotted, and made attempts to disrupt, under the guise that they had taken NBC and myself to court. The records of those meetings are still available, and I have my copies. In fact, we held so many stakeholder meetings preparatory to the ITU June 2015 deadline, at Protea Asokoro, Abuja that the hotel would later be jokingly referred to as the NBC Annex office.
Mr. Lai Mohammed is still the honorable Minister of Information and Culture and I believe he is quite able to defend himself and office against the spurious allegation of receiving illicit handouts from me, in exchange for providing assurances of support to keep me in office. By the way, I am extremely lucky to have served as chief executive of two federal parastatals, positions that I never lobbied for, and I say with some modesty that at both agencies I did my best to uplift them, and contribute to the growth of the Nigerian media and entertainment industry.
In February, 2016, as I left the NBC I left with my head and shoulders high. We started one of the most far reaching and visionary digital broadcasting reforms to transform Nigeria broadcasting and media industry. The steps we took and the achievements recorded are undeniable. Today those achievements serve as the platform for continuing growth in that sector. Again, the N10 Billion which the writer claimed I hid from the TSA was in the same NBC bank account where the money was received from MTN as license fee. I have been accused of many things, but even the EFCC has not accused me of personally enriching myself, or of using NBC money to finance any politician’s campaign. The case against me remains that I released payment to NBC’s consultant for raising the funds for the DSO as approved by the NBC Board and the President and Commander-In-Chief. I cannot comment further as the matter is before a judge and I believe that I shall be vindicated at the end of the day.
*Mba is former DG of NBC.






