The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC)’s website has been inactive for more than a month without information on what is responsible for its inactivity.
The commission is Nigeria’s broadcast media regulator established by the National Broadcasting Commission Act. The act empowers the commission to regulate and control the broadcasting industry, among other duties.
As an important information agency, the NBC operates a publicly accessible portal, https://nbc.gov.ng, where professionals and members of the general public could check out for data without messaging the commission.
On April 13, FIJ observed the website was down, and the situation is still the same. This persistent problem speaks too low of a media industry regulator with one of the highest numbers of license holders on the African continent.
Hundreds of media radio and television stations have been sanctioned for various alleged infractions against broadcasting codes and paid millions of naira as penalty to the commission.
It is not the first or second time the website would go off the radar without a statement from the commission to the public. The commission is, however, active on social media.
On May 12, the NBC issued a press statement on the recent judgement delivered by the Abuja Federal High Court barring it from arbitrary punishment of independent broadcast media houses and posted same on its Twitter page. The court ruled that the commission cannot singlehandedly invoke any provision of its enabling law against any media firm without resorting to judicial intervention.
About one month after this newspaper checked the regulator’s website, ‘server error 505’ remains the welcome message. Developers of Mozilla, an internet browser, say 500 internal server problem shows that a server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling a request.The commission appears comfortable using social media to release information, and as it stands, it seems no end in sight for the restoration of the website’s functionality, thus local and foreign information users would not find the website useful for legitimate purposes.
As it was on July 18, 2021, when FIJ reported that the website was down for two consecutive days, so it was when we checked the portal at press time on Saturday.
