NBC Regulatory Code: FG has declared war against Arts, producers - Soyinka

By Kazeem Ugbodaga

Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka on Tuesday said it is time the Federal Government come out openly and admit that it has declared war against the Arts and its producers with the new Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, NBC, Regulatory Code.

Soyinka, in a statement said FG must come out openly, instead of its present tactics of piecemeal attrition.

According to him, the NBC Regulatory Code “is economic sabotage writ large, directed against thousands of practitioners. Regulatory? This is strangulatory in effect!”

He said Just when “we were reeling from the action of the Ministry of Youth and Development in joining hands with book pirates by providing a free-loading portal for the works of Nigerian authors, among others, along comes a new regulatory hit against the cinema and video enterprise, and its operators.

“Let me quickly utilize the opening of this new flank to commend the Director-General of the Nigerian Copyright Commission for his prompt attention to the complaint by Nigerian authors.”

Soyinka lamented that it is now the turn of a sister industry to be placed under siege, saying he had just read excerpts of the newly proposed NBC broadcasting code and became aware of some potentially dangerous aspects of the code.

He said “whilst one concedes that some of the regulations are well intentioned, I shudder to imagine unintended consequences such as backhanded censorship in the age of digital media. These restrict intellectual property rights and their scope of exploitation with whomsoever one chooses to collaborate.

“Several practitioners’ voices have been raised in protest. For one such insider’s detailed and passionate exposition on the deleterious provisions of this Code, I shall draw particular attention of policy makers to Chris Ihidero’s Why Does the NBC Want to Kill Local Content in Nigeria? 

“If I may invoke a contemporary tragic image to render graphically what Ihidero and others have pleaded on behalf of both creators and consumers of this artistic productivity: Let government kindly take its knee off the neck of this industry. Please – let it breathe!”