The Big Brother Naija reality television show broadcasts on paid cable/satellite TV and not “open to air” or terrestrial TV.
This means that for you to watch the show, you must acquire cable modems; DSTV dish & decoder or GOTV antenna and decoder. After acquiring these items, you will then subscribe for a viewing plan by paying premium to have access to content. This access still does not guarantee your viewing of the BBN show unless you enroll with the service provider to have the channel open from the back-end for you to watch.
Secondly, you may decide to block access to the show in your home, the necessary steps to take have been made public by Multichoice. It can either be done via an SMS shortcode or you may use MYDTSV app or reach out to their customer service agents. These options of blocking access to the show have been advertised and promoted adequately for the past few years.
Thirdly, all DSTV and GOTV decoders come with PG control features that can be used to control content being viewed in homes.
These outlined points above clearly show that access to the BBN show is neither free, simple nor readily available unless one makes deliberate and conscious efforts to acquire viewership of the show at a premium cost. Therefore, campaigning for a ban of the TV show is clearly a misdirected effort.
The justifications being used to push the ban are sex, nudity and immorality.
The last time I checked, none of these had anything to do with the state of insecurity, high level corruption and failure of governance in Nigeria.
Rather, our problems begin and end with leadership across the political, religious, traditional and other institutional segments. It is highly hypocritical for anyone or group to push against a private sector project that is not forced on anyone and sit by as politicians openly pretend to be fainting on national and global TV when asked to account for tax-payers money entrusted to them. The brazen manner in which our leaders in government, religious institutions enrich themselves at the expense of the ordinary Nigerian is a much higher level of immorality.
The irresponsibility of our political leaders from the top to the bottom stinks beyond our universe in comparison to whatever actions those young unemployed housemates do on the show. Come to think of it, 95% of them are graduates but all are unemployed. I dare say, that the failure of the government to provide an enabling environment for them to get employed after education is what has lured most to finding means or alternatives to making a living so I don’t blame them if BBN offers them an avenue to expose themselves to opportunities or accelerate them towards their end goal.
For your information, the prize for this year’s show is a brand new 4WD car, a house (duplex) and the cash prize of N25m (total of N85m). Other participants of the show would have won some money running into millions by now or will do so by the time the show ends.
This is aside the various endorsement deals and contracts that will come their way. As far as I know, this is empowerment!
Note that all these are being done with funds from the private sector. No tax payers money or government backing or support but what most people do not know is that the Federal Government is the biggest beneficiary of the BBN show.
The revenue being made from the SMS votes alone is humongous. The FG through the National Communications Commission (NCC) owns and allocates those shortcodes for the SMS votes and gets a substantial percentage of the accrued revenue.
The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) is the regulator for media broadcasting in Nigeria. The NBC makes revenue from the broadcast of the show. Multichoice Nigeria also pays taxes to the FIRS and various states governments where it runs its operations.
Beyond the revenue benefits to the government, you need to travel to other African countries to appreciate how this show has helped build and promote Nigeria’s equity.
The truth is that in recent times, there has been little good news about or from Nigeria. BBN has helped position this country very positively with the global and African audience. Finally, any parent who has children at home and chooses not to take responsibility for the content being viewed by his or her children or wards at home is simply daft. No one should blame the producers of the show for that.
BBN is not the problem rather we are the problem. We do not protest against bad leadership; we condone irresponsibility and corruption from our leaders. We need to shut-up, think and then channel our energy and efforts into ensuring that Nigeria takes its place amongst the league of developed nations.
