News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) is the country’s official wire service, established by the Federal Military Government under General Olusegun Obasanjo through the News Agency of Nigeria Act (1976 No. 19), with statutory commencement from 10 May 1976. The Agency began pilot news operations on 2 October 1978, with the founding mandate of gathering and distributing news from domestic and international sources both within Nigeria and externally, in part to strengthen national control over news supply and reduce reliance on foreign wire agencies that had previously dominated news inputs into the Nigerian media. NAN now functions as the principal national wire service for newspapers, broadcasters, corporate clients and public institutions across Nigeria, distributing news through its nannews.ng digital platform and its daily General News Service bulletins.

While its early mission was to counter Western media narratives and offer a local perspective, NAN has since evolved into a central distribution hub for news consumed by newspapers, broadcasters, corporate clients, and public institutions across Nigeria.

Media assets

News agency: News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)

Ownership and governance

NAN is a state-owned federal public corporation established under the News Agency of Nigeria Act (1976 No. 19), with statutory commencement from 10 May 1976 and pilot operations from 2 October 1978; subsequently amended by the News Agency of Nigeria (Amendment) Act, 1992 No. 87, which added the statutory duty to “present complete, objective and impartial information” and to “report truthfully and fairly, without prejudice to public and national interest, the views of all sections of the population of the Federation.” Section 2(2) of the Act gives NAN a statutory intermediary role over “the sale, distribution in Nigeria, of news, information, economic and financial data and any other service or product of any foreign news agency to be marketed in Nigeria.” This is not a blanket monopoly over domestic news gathering or all digital information distribution, but it embeds NAN in the national information architecture in a way that is unusual among federal media agencies and gives the Agency a special intermediary role between foreign newswires and the Nigerian market.

Section 3 of the Act provides for an eight-member Board of Directors comprising: a Chairman appointed by the President on the recommendation of the supervising Minister; one representative of the Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation; one representative of the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON); one private-sector media representative speaking for subscribers to the Agency; the Managing Director; and the heads of NAN’s editorial, technical, and finance-and-administration departments. The composition is more mixed than at sister federal media corporations: only two of the eight members (the Chairman and the Information ministry representative) are direct federal appointments, with the remaining members serving ex officio (the MD and three department heads), or representing external constituencies (BON and the private-sector media subscribers). Schedule paragraph 1(2) sets a three-year board tenure renewable for one further three-year term.

Section 4 empowers the Minister to issue directives of a general character or relating to particular matters (but not to any individual person or case) to which the Board has a duty to comply; uniquely among the federal media statutes reviewed, Section 4(2) requires the Minister to serve a copy of the proposed direction on the Board in advance and to afford the Board an opportunity to make representations before the directive is finalised — a procedural safeguard absent from the comparable provisions in the FRCN, VON and NTA Acts. Section 5 provides for a Managing Director appointed by the President on the Minister’s recommendation, serving as chief executive responsible for day-to-day operations.

The current Managing Director is Ali Muhammad Ali, appointed by President Bola Tinubu on 19 October 2023 as part of the same wave of information-sector appointments that produced Salihu Dembos at NTA, Muhammed Bulama at FRCN, Jibrin Baba Ndace at VON, Charles Ebuebu at NBC, Lanre Issa-Onilu at NOA, and Lekan Fadolapo at ARCON. Ali assumed office on 23 October 2023, succeeding Buki Ponle (Buhari appointee, in post from September 2020 to expiry of tenure on 30 September 2023, with Director of Administration Abdulhadi Khaliel holding the role in acting capacity through October 2023). Ali Muhammad Ali brings over 30 years of journalism experience including prior service as Managing Director of People’s Daily and Editor-in-Chief of Triumph Newspaper, with a BA in International Affairs from Ahmadu Bello University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Mass Communication from Bayero University; he is still publicly identified in the role in 2026, most recently in a 27 March 2026 goodwill message at an ICPC/NUJ anti-corruption workshop carried by NAN’s own news site.

The supervising minister is Mohammed Idris (popularly known as Malagi), sworn in as Minister of Information and National Orientation on 21 August 2023, the ministry having been renamed under Tinubu from the previous Ministry of Information and Culture. The State Media Monitor review notes that Idris is also a long-standing private-media owner, associated with Blueprint Newspapers (as founder and publisher) and with WE 106.5 FM (owned by Kings Broadcasting Ltd, of which he is chair), a concentration of state-media supervisory authority with private commercial-media ownership interests that the review identifies as a structural conflict-of-interest concern across the federal public-media portfolio.

The 2024 Federal Executive Council Oronsaye Report implementation, which approved the merger of FRCN with Voice of Nigeria (VON) to form the proposed Federal Broadcasting Corporation of Nigeria, did not include NAN in the consolidation. As of May 2026, NAN continues to operate as a separate federal public corporation under its own 1976 statute, with no pending merger consolidation identified in the public record.

Source of funding and budget

NAN is primarily financed by federal subvention through the supervising ministry, supplemented by subscription income from institutional clients, including major newspapers, broadcasters, corporate subscribers and government bodies. Section 8 of the Act provides that the Agency’s fund may consist of federal grants and “all other moneys which may, from time to time, accrue to the Agency,” and authorises the Board to borrow with Presidential approval. The State Media Monitor baseline records federal allocations of approximately NGN 1.8 billion in 2020, approximately NGN 2.2 billion projected for 2022, and approximately NGN 2.77 billion in 2023. More recent public budget material identifies NAN-specific allocations of approximately NGN 3.89 billion in the 2025 executive budget proposal and approximately NGN 4.19 billion in the 2026 Appropriation Act. These figures should be read as proposed or approved allocations, not evidence of full disbursement; no recent audited NAN financial statements or actual-release figures were identified during this review. Information Minister Mohammed Idris’s 2026 budget defence listed NAN as one of the supervising ministry’s strategic agencies alongside the National Orientation Agency, NTA, FRCN and VON, with the minister separately highlighting a wider ministry-level capital-release problem under which only NGN 205 million of the ministry’s NGN 2.49 billion 2025 capital allocation had been released.

The 2026 Appropriation Act was assented to at approximately NGN 68.32 trillion after the National Assembly’s upward revision from the initial NGN 58.18 trillion proposal, with the implementation of the 2025 capital component extended to 30 June 2026. These figures have been set against a sharply devalued naira following the 2023 currency-unification reform, which materially reduced the real-dollar value of nominal federal allocations to NAN and other federal agencies. NAN’s commercial-revenue mix, subscription fees from newspapers, broadcasters and corporate clients, alongside specialist products such as PRWire and BizCom, provides some cushion against pure budget-cycle dependency, although the State Media Monitor baseline records self-generated income at well under 10 percent of total revenue, indicating that federal subvention remains the dominant income source.

Editorial independence

The 1992 amendment to Section 2 of the NAN Act formally requires the Agency to “present complete, objective and impartial information, news or news material or features on any matter of public or national interest” and to “report truthfully and fairly, without prejudice to public and national interest, the views of all sections of the population of the Federation.” These statutory duties are nonetheless paired in the same Act with Section 4 ministerial-directive powers (general directives that NAN has a statutory duty to comply with, subject to the consultation procedure described above) and with Section 5 Presidential appointment authority over the Managing Director on the supervising Minister’s recommendation. No arm’s-length appointment system, independent funding settlement, published editorial charter, ombudsman or external complaints mechanism is in place.

The State Media Monitor review records that NAN is widely regarded as a professional and operationally capable newswire with one of the most extensive national footprints of any media organisation in Nigeria, while its editorial output is widely regarded by Nigerian journalists and media observers as closely aligned with government messaging, prioritising government-related coverage and rarely deviating from official narratives on politically sensitive topics.

These conditions place NAN firmly in the State-Controlled (SC) category. The Agency is a federal public corporation governed by the News Agency of Nigeria Act, with its Chair and Managing Director appointed through federal executive channels, a statutory Ministry representative on the Board, and ministerial directive powers preserved under Section 4, even though the Act requires prior consultation with the Board before a directive is finalised. The Act also gives NAN a statutory intermediary role over the sale and distribution in Nigeria of foreign-news-agency products, embedding it in the federal information architecture. Although the 1992 amendment requires NAN to present complete, objective and impartial information and to report truthfully and fairly the views of all sections of the population, those duties are not supported by arm’s-length appointment procedures, an independent funding settlement, a published editorial charter, an ombudsman or an external complaints mechanism. NAN remains primarily dependent on federal appropriations, supplemented by limited subscription and service income. The October 2023 appointment of Ali Muhammad Ali, the continuing ministerial-supervision structure, the absence of any Oronsaye-style governance reform involving NAN, and the agency’s role as Nigeria’s official national wire all support the continued SC classification for 2026.

AI and digital policy

NAN maintains an active digital presence through its nannews.ng online news platform (launched 8 August 2016 and operating continuously through 2026), social-media channels, and direct subscription feeds to media and corporate clients. Managing Director Ali Muhammad Ali has publicly engaged with AI policy questions for the news-agency sector, addressing the 6th World Media Summit in Urumqi, China, in October 2024 on the theme “Artificial Intelligence and Media Transformation,” where he argued that the media must both harness AI opportunities and put in place safeguards against its negative effects. No NAN-specific published policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure or content-provenance standards such as C2PA was identified during this review. At the national level, Nigeria was confirmed in November 2025 as host of UNESCO’s first International Media and Information Literacy Institute, which was launched in Abuja in April 2026 and provides a potential institutional anchor for future sector-specific frameworks; no implementation rules governing AI-generated or synthetic content in Nigeria’s federal news agency were identified during this review.

May 2026