Global Drums and Local Masquerades

TV broadcasting has been in Nigeria for more than 50 years (1959-2009). Its development has brought about a series of local responses to global socioeconomic and political environments and “soft” stimuli. This conclusion is based on a critical, interpretive reading of the history, form, and content of television in Nigeria from Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Nigeria Television in Ibadan through the federal government’s reactive establishment of the national network: the Nigeria Television Authority, and later, states and private television stations. The ultimate deregulation of television broadcasting in 1992, perceived as Babangida’s “politically-correct” reaction to the pressures from the Bretton Woods institutions, opened up national media markets for global penetration, and fast-tracked media globalization and its effects in Nigeria. While television stations in Nigeria have multiplied in numerical terms, programming/content/form have followed the global market/technological determinism turning Nigerian TV into localized versions of commercialized western master-scripts with very little local ideological direction.