Okoh Aihe
The slash-and-burn agriculture which forms a major plank of shifting cultivation used to announce the coming of a new planting season. As children we didn’t like the clearing part of it but the burning aspect was the big deal. No child my age really loved to stay under a thick bush at the time with a sharp cutlas, from morning to evening, with occasional rest; and dehydration brother, water was in shot supply. During bush burning there was excitement because it provides the long-awaited opportunity to trap some unfortunate animals still mistaking the dry vegetation as home and turn them to bush meat immediately. Sometimes, you see a little antelope skipping away from the fire and it is a marvel how as children we would run through raging fire to make a hit. Quite some thrill for children innocently oblivious of the danger lurking in the fire.
But the more interesting one is ferreting out those cavity dwellers in the snags. Yes, those little animals who live inside standing dead trees in the new farm ready to be planted. Days after the burning it was easy to sense life inside the trees with evidence at the base. There are usually holes in the trees not far from the ground. As children we would simply set fire at the base waiting for the cavity dwellers to drop. Sometimes the ones that could fly find an escape route at the top of the tree, and they simply fly away. This is where I am coming to. There is a particular one which seems to be a senior member of the squirrel family. As you know, the squirrel cannot fly.
The local name in my part of the world of Edo State is ekhile! Trust me, this one is hardened. No matter the fire and the smoke, she will simply encourage the children: be strong and patient, my dear. In a short while, those people out there setting fire to our home will be tired and go away. Always that was the result. Tired and frustrated, we would walk away exhausted, without any evidence of success. The cavity dweller has won. My story is a little allegory. February 7, 2026, a new radio station, Majority FM 89.5, commenced broadcast services in Port Harcourt, the famed Garden City of the nation. At the commissioning, an excited Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, enthused that the station was set up to support the 2027 re-election campaign of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Even if the Minister wasn’t voluble with words, the fact that the station is domiciled within the Renewed Hope Ambassadors’ office in Port Harcourt would already have sent out its communications. Wike was doing his job. He is a politician. There is a battle ahead because that is the way the politicians see elections in this part of the world. He has to take care of every front and you can’t blame him for being preemptive and deploying his resources to reasonable use. He is a fighter and wouldn’t wait to be ambushed into some level of helplessness by some political infra dignitatem. However, the development in Port Harcourt caused a lot of discomfort in some broadcast circles.
Some folks in the broadcast profession couldn’t understand why a station could be set up in clear defiance of the National Broadcasting Commission Act 2004 and the Nigeria Broadcasting Code which forbid religious bodies and political parties from running broadcast stations. As they say in situations like this, the buck stops on the NCC’s table. In our intervention on February 11, 2026, we wrote: ‘’What needs to happen? This is the time to immediately find out the nature of licence issued to the operator in Port Harcourt and whether the licence is being put to proper use. This demands an exigent response from the regulator because, heading down to the political season, many more people may want to take actions that can set the nation on edge. Broadcasting is too sensitive to be left to politics and religion.
The end result may be too catastrophic for people, including the ordinary guys who are struggling with the daily grind of life.’’ We pointed to the dangerous role of broadcasting in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 which consumed over a million people in just three months, warning that was no route for any other nation to follow. Unfortunately, ordinary folks don’t make the choices; politicians do, and the stakes become too high and dangerous to be managed. Some people who knew the implications of what happened in Port Harcourt are still waiting for the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to take a decisive action because the law clearly supports it to do so.
The implication of any prevarication on the part of the regulator may be too far-reaching for any body to contemplate in the immediate. Expressing deep worries in a Facebook post, titled: ‘’The Gagging of a Nation: Wike’s Majority FM and the Final Betrayal of Nigerian Democracy, Ahmed Tijjani Ramalan, wrote: The deeper danger is structural. If a federal minister can carve out a frequency for his political principal today, what stops every influential godfather, state governor, or moneybag from demanding their own tomorrow? Nigeria’s media space – already fragile, polarized and vulnerable to capture – would fragment into rival propaganda fiefdoms, each funded directly or indirectly by public resources or the proceeds of power.”
The above paints the picture of anarchy which nobody wishes for our nation but it behooves us to make timely intervention before things fester, as Langston Hughes would put it in his poem, Harlem, which inspired Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun. Nobody wants our nation to fester like a sore. But little things can ignite a fire, not even the one as big and audacious as an individual setting up a broadcast station and crashing the airwaves without consequences. It is the position of any individual to commit any action but it is the place of the law to play its role. Trim the excesses of such an individual. This is where the allegory steps in. For over a month, stakeholders of the broadcast industry have waited for the NBC to act but no words yet.
Perhaps they are doing things quietly and would make an announcement soon. It seems however, we are much closer to the place of the cavity dwellers. This is not to ever insinuate about NBC being cavity dwells (that system remains one of the best created by the military in 1992) but there seems to be a deliberate silence and inaction to the effect that people will soon be tired of waiting for information on Majority FM. I am trying to encourage the NBC to do something urgently because this is an unusual Nigerian story that is unfolding. Nobody can predict how the plot will develop or determine how the story will end. It is very easy to look at power structure and political hegemony and create a political convenience which does not ever replace a sound regulatory decision but, instead, create chaos.
This nation cannot add another chaos. The NBC should activate the Broadcasting Act and spare the nation any unfortunate development that may arise from the operations of Majority FM and, by that same action, remove one unnecessary problem from the President’s menu.
