How Nigeria learned to broadcast

The channels that were already there

Nigeria was not silent before the transmitter, and the town crier was not the whole of it. Scholars of African communication call the indigenous systems oramedia — a term the Nigerian scholar Frank Okwu Ugboajah used in his 1982 work on the subject, describing communication rooted in dialogue and verbal exchange with listeners always present.

A 1974 seminar on communication for development catalogued ten distinct structures. The gongman or town crier is only the first of them, carrying messages within a radius of roughly five miles. The others were the talking drum, the hornman, visual symbols and colours, the minstrel, poets and reciters, storytellers, drama and dance and mime and puppetry, traditional leaders, and social structures — the marketplace above all, as the place where interaction actually happened.

Print arrived long before broadcast. Iwe Irohin fun awon ara Egba ati Yoruba was founded by the Reverend Henry Townsend in Abeokuta on 3 December 1859 — Nigeria's first newspaper, published every fortnight, priced at 120 cowries, with an English edition added in January 1866. It was destroyed in 1867 when an uprising in Abeokuta expelled the Europeans and wrecked its printing press.

The loudspeaker years

Broadcasting in Nigeria did not begin with a transmitter. It began with wire. The colonial government's Radio Diffusion Service piped the BBC's overseas programmes into public places in Lagos through loudspeakers, and listeners gathered to hear a signal that was relayed rather than made here.

Nothing about the arrangement was Nigerian except the audience. Programming, editorial control and purpose all sat in London, and the service existed to keep a colony informed of the empire's version of events. The technical limitation and the political one pointed the same way: reception without production.

Television before the nation

On 31 October 1959, WNTV went on air from Ibadan — the first television station in tropical Africa. Nigeria was still a year away from independence, and the station belonged not to the federal government but to the Western Region. It could exist at all because a constitutional change had made broadcasting a concurrent rather than an exclusively federal matter, and it had the political backing of Obafemi Awolowo and Anthony Enahoro. It was built as a partnership with Overseas Rediffusion, a foreign operator that withdrew in 1962 and left the regional government in sole control.

The station's slogan was First in Africa, which was not true and which WNTV itself later conceded: Morocco's TELMA and Algeria's RTF had television before it. First in tropical Africa is the claim that survives scrutiny — and a lesson in reading a broadcaster's own account of itself carefully.

The origin matters more than the date. Nigerian television began as a regional instrument, and once one region had it the others followed. Television here was federalist before the federation was, and the argument over who controls a signal has never really left Nigerian broadcasting since.

Everything becomes federal

The military government reversed the regional pattern completely. State television stations were taken over and folded into a single national body, the Nigerian Television Authority, and for the next fifteen years there was no legal route by which a private citizen could own a broadcast station in Nigeria.

This is the period that shaped the habits Nigerian audiences still recognise: a nine o'clock network news bulletin carried simultaneously by every station, and a definition of "national" broadcasting that meant "federal". Radio consolidated the same way — the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria was created in 1978 by merging the NBC with the Broadcasting Corporation of Northern Nigeria.

The airwaves open

For nearly sixty years, every broadcaster in Nigeria was owned by a government. That ended on 24 August 1992, when Decree 38 created the National Broadcasting Commission and, with it, a lawful route for private operators to hold a licence.

The first to use it was Ray Power 100.5, which began commercial broadcasting in Lagos on 1 September 1994 — owned by DAAR Communications, founded by Raymond Dokpesi. It was Nigeria's first private independent broadcasting station and its first round-the-clock service. Private television followed within months: Minaj Broadcast International began regular service from Obosi, Anambra State, on 1 December 1994, and DAAR's Africa Independent Television started terrestrial broadcasting on 6 December 1996.

A transmitter in every pocket

Deregulation gave Nigeria more stations. What changed the shape of broadcasting was something the National Broadcasting Commission never licensed. The Nigerian Communications Commission auctioned GSM licences at the start of 2001, and on 6 May Strive Masiyiwa of Econet Wireless placed the country's first mobile call — "We're live!" — with MTN following on 16 May.

It was a luxury at first. Econet charged ₦15,000 to connect and ₦15,000 for a handset; MTN charged ₦20,000 for each. Nigeria had roughly 270,000 cellular subscriptions in 2001. By 2019 it had about 185 million.

Broadcasting had rested on one arrangement since 1933: a few licensed senders, a very large number of receivers, and a regulator sitting on the gap between them. The mobile phone put a sender in the audience's hand. Everything in the two entries below follows from that.

The regulator pushes back

The #EndSARS protests were the first Nigerian story where the footage that mattered came from participants rather than crews. On 23 October 2020, the National Broadcasting Commission fined Channels Television, Africa Independent Television and Arise Television ₦3 million each for what it called the use of unsubstantiated footage from social media in their protest coverage. The letters named no specific broadcast.

The pattern continued past broadcasting. On 5 June 2021 the federal government suspended Twitter nationwide, days after the platform deleted a post by President Muhammadu Buhari; the suspension lasted about seven months and was lifted on 13 January 2022 after Twitter agreed to register locally and pay tax.

The courts pushed back in turn. On 27 May 2022, Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa of the Federal High Court in Lagos declared the amendment to the sixth edition of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code ultra vires, incompetent, null and void, ruling that the NBC had no power to prohibit content exclusivity or compel broadcasters to sub-license rights they had lawfully bought.

The analogue sunset

Nigeria signed the ITU's GE06 agreement in 2006, committing to end analogue television by 17 June 2015. It missed that deadline, and every one after it. A pilot service branded FreeTV launched in Jos, Plateau State, in 2017; by April 2026, digital terrestrial signals had reached only eight states, at a reported cost of around ₦80 billion across seventeen years.

On 17 June 2026 — eleven years to the day after the original deadline — the government relaunched the Digital Switchover, announced by Information Minister Mohammed Idris, delivered through a hybrid satellite and mobile platform carrying over a hundred free channels. Analogue television is scheduled to be switched off nationwide on 31 December 2028.

It is not settled. In May 2026 the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria challenged the design, arguing that a satellite-delivered service is not the digital terrestrial migration the agreement actually requires. Whether they are right is a live question in Nigerian media policy, and one worth watching while it is still open.

Where the audience actually is

The regulator still licenses transmitters, but a growing share of Nigerians meet the news somewhere else entirely. Among the country's online news users surveyed for the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025, Facebook was a news source for 65%, WhatsApp for 53%, and YouTube and X for 49% each — with X up nine points in a single year.

Trust runs higher than the global average at 68%, and the brands named as credible are a mix of the state-era and the deregulation-era: BBC News, Channels TV, The Punch. Broadcasting did not lose to social media so much as move onto it.

The counterweight is safety. Nigeria ranks 122nd of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, with 56 documented attacks on journalists during the 2024 protests. A deregulated market is not automatically a free one.