“We will amend the NBC code to ensure that our Premier League improves. We will make sure that in the Code if you spend one million dollars to support a foreign football club like Manchester United in Nigeria, you will not be allowed to air that programme unless you spend 30 per cent of that money to promote Nigeria’s league,” he said. I wrote about it in August , exploring how it can be achieved.
In his preface, Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, Director-General of the NBC, wrote passionately about providing a patriotic broadcasting code that would ensure the primacy of local content across many platforms, one of which is the sports industry. Mr Kawu indicated that the code “needed to become strongly affirmative of the national aspiration to create and defend jobs in the creative industries within the Nigerian economy.
Article 6.2.11 holds that “No Prime Foreign Sports Context shall be transmitted in the Nigerian territory unless the owner of such content has also acquired Prime Local Sports Content of the same category with a minimum of 30 per cent of the cost of acquiring the Prime Foreign Sports Content.
When I spoke to some broadcast industry executives about this provision in the new broadcasting code, they were dismissive. The general opinion is that NBC cannot coerce businesses to spend their money on local sports where there are no eyeballs. The consensus is that advertisers will place their adverts where the fans are watching based on the data available.