THE FUTURE OF BROADCASTING IN NIGERIA (1) Frank Tietie
The country has fallen far short in its bid to catch up with the international community in digital broadcasting, writes
Television broadcasting is of so much importance to citizens and the Nigerian state as a means of national integration and cultural development in a fast-paced global arena driven mainly by communication technology. Nigeria has fallen far short in its bid to catch up with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards in terms of quality and timing in switching over to a digital broadcasting. Whereas Nigeria has missed more than two deadlines in the digital switch over process to the disappointment of many Nigerians and ITU, what has become more embarrassing is the claim by Mr Tony Dara that the transmitters installed by ITS have been discontinued by the original equipment manufacturer more than 10 years ago. Dara, an acclaimed broadcast engineer who had acted as a consultant to the National Assembly on Nigeria’s digital switch over, brought this fact to the public sphere and the famed Nigerian factor has begun to set in.
Responding to the finding on installation of obsolete transmitters that have been discontinued by the original equipment manufacturer, Integrated Television Services (ITS) General Manager, Rotimi Salami did not contradict the finding but instead confirmed that the transmitters were indeed “commercialised in 2008” and sought to rationalise using them on the “room for backward integration” existing in broadcast technology which he nevertheless described as “very dynamic… innovations are made at an alarming rate”.
Even before the now unavoidable legislative inquiry into the shocking findings of Tony Dara, the defaulting Integrated Television Services (ITS) has owned up to installing obsolete broadcast equipment in the Jos pilot project centre. The NTA subsidiary put out an advert supposedly “to expose the fallacies and outright falsehood” in the Dara Report in which it ended up confirming the veracity of the finding.
With a GM like Rotimi Salami who adheres to the retrograde culture of backwardly integrating into broadcast technology, it should not be surprising that ITS finds nothing wrong with launching Nigeria into the digital age of broadcasting using obsolete transmitters just to ensure that the “other room” of backward integration vacated by fast changing technology is not left empty!
Let the rest of the world strive to keep pace with the innovations and dynamism of digital signals broadcast, while Nigerians make do with antiquated modems so that the technical epilepsy associated with electricity supply will be
DOES NIGERIA HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE ANALOGUE-FANATICS PUSHING BACKWARD INTEGRATION WHILE THE WORLD IS ON DIGITAL FAST TRACK IN BROADCAST TECHNOLOGY?
transferred into our broadcasting infrastructure’s “compatibility” hardware. It was the same sickening surrender to stagnant development that led ITS into retaining old buildings and facilities to house the DSO in Jos and Ilorin, another flaw identified in the Dara Report that ITS failed to debunk. According to ITS GM, there was no reason to even consider new buildings for the DSO process because nine years ago the White Paper on DSO recommended that the “existing and massive” broadcast transmission infrastructure of the NTA, VON and FRCN should form the backbone for the new broadcast signal distributor. Someone should ask Mr Salami of ITS why these old buildings were not even considered for renovation.
Again, to add pseudo-savvy to the idleness of its initiatives, ITS GM exposed the fallacies integrated into decisions by declaring that “a building does not determine the quality of transmission, rather (sic) it is the state of the equipment”. This evidently cannot be technically applicable to a backwardly integrated compatibility-chasing choice of obsolete equipment that will be depending on perpetual coupling and combinations to deliver digital output from analogue inputs! What would it have cost to put up new buildings designed with the spatial and other specifications suitable for workflow in the DSO which is not comparable to the decades old analogue equipment “existing” in NTA?
It is unfortunate that these are the untenable, illogical and technically bankrupt responses that ITS churned out in a vexatious attempt to dismiss the clear compilation of the deceptive and defective foundation laid for the DSO in Nigeria by the federal government’s own agents and agencies.
The crux of this disturbing matter is that over N1.7 billion was collected by the NTA-ITS from federal government coffers specifically as take-off grant for the DSO pilot project! With such a humongous budget, why should their DSO project be relying on discontinued obsolete equipment when at every material time there were latest successor models of the digital transmitters by the same manufacturer which are in fact future-assured technology and not the retrograde discarded systems that Mr Salami and his colleagues will be using to prove their backwardness? Does Nigeria have to wait for the analogue-fanatics pushing backward integration while the world is on digital fast track in broadcast technology?