Wole Soyinka kicks against regulatory code of the NBC

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has said that new regulatory code of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, NBC, is against art and its producers.

Soyinka stated that the Federal Government should come clean about it instead of a 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 revealed that the new regulatory code which he just read contains some dangerous aspects.

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!”