Anxiety is building up within the stakeholders circle and concerned members of the National Assembly over the possibility of missing another chance of transiting from analogue to digital TV broadcasting in Nigeria.
Accordingly, observers have listed three factors that can derail the scheme if care is not taken by government and mainly the supervising agency, national Broadcasting Commission (NBC).
The factors so listed include lack of driving policy, inadequate funding and poor infrastructure provision.
Business Hilights recalls that these are the major factors that failed Nigeria effort to migrate in 2015.
Only recently, the House of Representatives was in Jos, Plateau to oversee the performance of the pilot switchover and was informed by the signal distributor, Integrated Television Services (ITS); that among the three factors hobbling the DSO, inadequate funding and poor infrastructure provision are critical even though government can effectively handle the dearth of policy issue on the scheme with executive fiat.
During the visit of the House members, Rotimi Salami the managing director of ITS, told the House Committee on Information, National Orientation, Ethics and Values, led by its Chairman, Olusegun Odebunmi, that “the challenge we are having is funding and government money is not just spent anyhow you want, there is a process and this process is guided by principles”.
“For example, we inherited infrastructure from the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), but we need to replace analogue equipment. We have to install infrastructure and we need N45 billion to put effective infrastructure that will cover Nigeria, we need support to realise our goal.”
Responding, the House Committee members decried slow pace of activities and awareness creation on the side of the federal agency, noting that almost every key player in the DSO deal is fraught with one critical challenge or another when there is no time.
The House members observed during the visit that part of the part of the policy issue hobbling the scheme is the absence of the project in any law book of the land, saying DSo is further compounded by Nigeria’s inability to have domesticated the global prevailing International Telecoms Union (ITU) treaty signed by Nigeria.
The lawmakers further observed that there has been no appropriation for the DSO since inception of the process, saying it is not even in the 2017 budget.
Before now, the Director-General of NBC, Mallam Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, had told the lawmakers that “We need about 30 million boxes for Nigeria, if we assume that a television household is a man, one wife, and four children; it’s a six-person’s household. If we multiply 30 million boxes by $45, which is the cost for one box in the present ecosystem (about $1.2billion), maybe we would need the entire budget of Nigeria to achieve 30 million boxes.”
He added that Nigeria has only been able to import the first sets of 650,000 set-top boxes, at a cost of $26 million, which were subsidised by Government and given out to Nigerians at only N1,500.
Analysts of the DSO had made it clear since last year that the country will need about N366billion to purchase about 30 million set-top boxes at $45 each to meet the digital needs of at least 95 per cent of households.
