Federal Government has shelved plans to force international social network services and digital platforms to register and open offices in Nigeria.
According to the Punch government’s move to ensure that all over-the-top media services register with the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) has also hit a brick wall as the NBC has failed to roll out the modalities for the registration six months after it published an advertorial asking all online platforms to do so.
The Nigerian government had in June last year suspended Twitter barely days after the platform deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari.
The Federal Government subsequently stated that Twitter and all other over-the-top media services must register and pay tax in Nigeria and register with the NBC.
Alhaji Lai Mohammed, minister of Information and Culture, had said, “What we are saying is that all platforms must register in Nigeria. You must be a corporate entity before you can do business in Nigeria.
“Whether it is Netflix, Iroko, or Facebook…they are all doing business in Nigeria, making money and they are not paying taxes. This is in addition to being able to regulate them. They are making billions of naira out of this country and they are not paying tax. That can’t be allowed to go on.”
Subsequently in June, the NBC asked all social media platforms and online broadcasting service providers operating in Nigeria to apply for a broadcast licence.
The commission said in an advertorial that the NBC establishment code empowers the commission to ask the companies to be licensed.
But the Punch learnt that the NBC had no framework for licensing social media platforms.
Adamu Garba, chief executive officer at IPI Group Limited, who is also the co-founder of social media platform, Crowwe, said several attempts made by his firm to register with the NBC proved abortive.
Garba said after six months of attempting to register his platform with the NBC, officials at the commission finally admitted to him that there was no framework for licensing social media platforms in Nigeria.
He said, “Frankly, there is a problem because there is no framework to register social media based on what I saw. It is a challenge because we went to all the departments in the NBC. None of them was doing anything at all. Eventually, they confessed that this is the situation at hand and that they don’t have that kind of framework where we can register as social media operators.”
A top official at the NBC told Punch that the Twitter suspension was a knee-jerk reaction and the government didn’t know how to go about the lifting of the suspension, hence it had to introduce some policies.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “The NBC has no power or infrastructure in place to license or regulate social media except the Act establishing the commission is amended.
“The truth is that all the policies rolled out at the time were targeted at Twitter. Now that Twitter has agreed to set up an office in Nigeria, the government is no longer talking about others.”
