Wired broadcasting in Nigeria lasted for almost 20 years before the country switched to wireless broadcasting in 1951 (Ladele et al., 1979). This too was as the result of new developments in broadcasting in the British Empire as a whole.
Technological advancement was also an important factor: cheap wireless radio sets, particularly the Saucepan Special made for Africans (Spitulnik, 1998), have emerged in the market in the 1950s. The main factor, though, was the British decision to improve on the state of broadcasting in its colonies. In 1948 the Colonial Office set up a committee, led by BBC engineer L. W. Turner and telecommunication engineer F. W. Byron, to carry out a survey on radio broadcasting in four West African colonies of Nigeria, Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone and The Gambia. The committee found that broadcasting facilities, particularly in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, were inadequate; and recommended, among others, the introduction of wireless broadcasting and the replacement of old broadcasting equipment (Ladele et al., 1979). ‗In the light of these observations, the report concluded that there was an urgent need to establish a proper wireless broadcasting service in Nigeria, even if existing wired broadcasting systems would be continued and expanded where possible‘ (p.17).
The adoption of those recommendations resulted in both the establishment of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) in 1952 to replace the Radio Diffusion Service (RDS) and the switch to wireless broadcasting. The Lagos office was upgraded and turned into the national headquarters, the stations in Ibadan (West), Kaduna (North) and Enugu (East) were restructured and upgraded to regional stations, and Marconi transmitters were installed in those cities (Sambe, 2005).
One of the remarkable improvements noticed in the new service, according to Ladele et al. (1979), was the successful transmission of over 30 outside broadcasts from various parts of the country during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip in 1956.
The establishment of NBS and the switch to wireless system brought tremendous changes in the nature, content and structure of broadcasting in colonial Nigeria.
Broadcast materials were now coming from national (Lagos) and regional (Kaduna, Ibadan and Enugu) levels; the direct international broadcasts from the BBC no longer took precedence; and the local provincial broadcasts were downgraded. The intention appeared to be to use radio to mould listeners into Northerners, Westerners and Easterners at regional level; into Nigerians at national level; and into members of the British Empire at the international level. The attempt to create regional identity was problematic, though, in the sense that none of the three regions was homogeneous: they all have ethnic minorities who complained of domination by the major ethnic groups. Northern Nigeria with its huge area and wide ethnic diversity presented a special case. Although Islam is the dominant religion and Hausa is the lingua franca, there are some people in the region who are uncomfortable with one or both. Creating a balance was delicate.
The old Ilorin Province, for example, although it belonged to Northern Region geographically and is predominantly Islamic, its people are predominantly speaking and many of them tended to prefer broadcasts from the Yoruba-speaking Western regional broadcasts in Ibadan than the broadcasts from Kaduna (Larkin, 2008). Switching to wireless system and initiating programmes from regional rather than provincial level meant that local news such us ‗Kano News and Zaria News were replaced with a single ―Northern Region‖ broadcast in Hausa, a decision that had great consequences for non-Hausa-speaking areas of the North,‘ Larkin (2008) observed. ‗Minority languages like Tiv, Igala, and Nupe
would now have to receive a news broadcast in their language once a week instead of every day. The colonial Resident of Ilorin sent an immediate telegram on receiving this news, arguing that ―for political reasons‖ alone there should be full regional news in Yoruba‘ (Larkin, 2008, p.67). The response he got from the controller of programmes in the Northern Region was that the regional broadcasting authority would do programmes that would make them listen to the station. ‗It is up to us here in Kaduna to do all we can to provide programmes that will keep the Northern Yoruba tuned to the North Regional rather than the West Regional Programme,‘ the controller wrote, ‗(but) it will be difficult to stop listeners with private wireless sets from listening to Ibadan‘ (Letter of Controller, Northern Region, 9 April 1954, cited in Larkin, 2008, pp.67-68).
This idea of choice offered to listeners by the wireless system was a major issue that provoked stiff resistance from conservative colonial administrators who saw colonial subjects‘ access to rival broadcasters as a threat to British hegemony.
Wireless system exposed Nigerians to other broadcast stations from places like Russia and the Arab world that were competing with Britain for sphere of influence in Nigeria. The then emir of Kano was, for instance, said to have been going out to Dala Hill in his Rolls-Royce with his radio set to listen to broadcasts from radical Gamal Abdel Nasser‘s Egypt in the 1950s, and the emir of Gusau requested for the inclusion of radio frequencies of ‗Egypt, the Gold Coast, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan‘ in the Nigerian Radio Times (Kukah, 1993; Larkin, 2008, p.68). This exposure to alternative broadcasts was one of the things the conservative colonial administrators had sought to prevent by opposing wireless broadcasting. The Resident of Adamawa Province, in his opposition to the introduction of the system, had written to say that wired broadcasting ‗has obvious scope as a counter to subversive activities‘ and that broadcasting ‗is primarily dictated by political consideration‘ (Minute on Radio Diffusion Service, 1951, cited in Larkin, 2008, p.66). Similarly, a broadcasting officer at the time Mr Bunting had warned of the consequences of switching to wireless, especially when he felt that a large number of people could not afford wireless sets: ‗It is these people that the government wishes to reach with propaganda and instruction. If they did have their own wireless sets, they would be unlikely to tune them in to reasonable stations‘ (cited in Larkin, 2008, p.66).
Despite the stiff opposition, however, the wireless argument won and Nigerians were offered the chance to listen to different broadcast stations—along with their political intents as well. The wired loudspeakers that were the hallmark of wired broadcasting made way for Saucepan Specials and wooden cabinets that made radio an object of domestic consumption (Larkin, 2008)—and highlighted another distinguishing feature of the wireless system: mobility. The wireless set is mobile and the invention of cheap transistor radio in the 1940s and its spread to the Third World nations in the 1960s and 1970s brought massive expansion in radio ownership (Mytton, 1993; Mytton and Forrester, 1988) and made it the object of both domestic and public consumption.
The switch to wireless in Nigeria had loosened the British colonialists‘ control on the choice of broadcasters, but it had not lessened their control of broadcasting in the country, much to the annoyance of many Nigerian nationalists. The Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) which was supposed to emulate the BBC‘s model of impartiality was clearly breaching that, and was siding with the colonial regime against the nationalists. A parliamentary motion by independence advocate, Anthony Enahoro, calling for self-government in 1956 did not go down well with the colonial regime. The colonial government ‗used the radio station to broadcast to the people (its own position), but refused the nationalists the use of radio to explain their own version of the story‘ (Sambe, 2005, pp.83-84). The nationalists then agitated for NBS‘s transformation into a public corporation and succeeded in getting it turned into Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) on 1 April 1957
‗as the first public broadcasting corporation so established in any British colonial territory‘ (p.84). But this did not end the alleged partiality against the nationalists.
Ironically, it was this situation that led to the establishment in 1959 of the Western Region‘s television station (Larkin, 2008), the first television station in Africa (Mytton, 1983; Sambe, 2005).
The colonial administration in the Western Region used the NBC to criticise Chief Awolowo-led Action Group, the dominant political party in the region, and when Awolowo demanded the right of reply, he was denied. Then, Awolowo, as premier of the Western Region‘s government, entered into agreement with a UK firm, Overseas Rediffusion Limited, and established a radio and television station under
the Western Nigerian Broadcasting Service in 1959. The Eastern Nigerian government imitated this, entering into agreement with the same UK firm, and set up its own broadcast station on the day of Nigeria‘s independence, 1 October 1960. ‗The pattern was repeated later by the Northern State, which in 1961 entered into a similar partnership with Granada and EMI of England, and even by NBC in 1962, which, in reaction to the introduction of television by the regional governments, signed an agreement with an American company, NBC International‘ (Katz and Wedell, 1977, pp.81-82). Thus, all the three regional governments had their radio and television stations and the central government too had hers.