Nigerian Television Authority (NTA)

The Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) is Nigeria’s national federal television broadcaster, established by Decree No. 24 of 1977, with statutory commencement from 1 April 1976 and federal consolidation effective in May 1977, bringing together the regional television stations that had developed in Nigeria from 1959 onwards. The lineage begins with the Western Nigerian Television Service (WNTV) launched in Ibadan on 31 October 1959 by the Western Regional Government, widely described as the first television service in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by the Eastern Nigerian Television Service (1960), Radio Television Kaduna of the Northern Region (1962) and Nigerian Television Service Lagos (1962). Federal consolidation under the 1977 decree produced a unified national broadcaster organised around the principle of one station per state, governed today by the Nigerian Television Authority Act (NTA Act).

NTA today operates more than 100 broadcast outlets, including state-capital stations, urban-area satellites, thematic channels and the international service, making it one of the largest terrestrial television networks in Africa by geographic footprint. The broadcaster is headquartered at Television House in the Garki district of Abuja and is supervised by the Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation, the supervising ministry having been renamed under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu from its previous form as the Ministry of Information and Culture.

Media assets

NTA’s network is built around state-capital stations, secondary urban-area stations, thematic channels and an international service. Published station listings include (selected, not exhaustive):

• National and regional television stations: NTA Aba, NTA Abeokuta, NTA Abuja, NTA Plus Abuja, NTA Ado-Ekiti, NTA Akure, NTA Asaba, NTA Awka, NTA Bauchi, NTA Benin, NTA Birnin-Kebbi, NTA Calabar, NTA Damaturu, NTA Dutse, NTA Enugu, NTA Gombe, NTA Gusau, NTA Ibadan, NTA Ife, NTA Ijebu-Ode, NTA Ilorin, NTA Jalingo, NTA Jos, NTA Kaduna, NTA Kano, NTA Katsina, NTA 2 Channel 5 Lagos, NTA Channel 10 Lagos, NTA Lafia, NTA Lokoja, NTA Maiduguri, NTA Makurdi, NTA Minna, NTA Ondo, NTA Osogbo, NTA Owerri, NTA Oyo, NTA Port Harcourt, NTA Sokoto, NTA Uyo, NTA Yenagoa, NTA Yola, NTA Sapele
• Thematic channels: NTA Education, NTA Sports
• International service: NTA International — the network’s international-facing satellite channel

Ownership and governance

NTA is a state-owned federal public corporation governed by the NTA Act. Its governance framework places ultimate authority in a federally appointed Authority/Board, with members appointed by the President on the recommendation of the supervising minister. The statutory composition set out in Section 2 of the Act covers the chairman, the chairman of each Zonal Board, the Director-General, a representative of the supervising ministry, a representative of women’s organisations in Nigeria, and six persons with expertise in mass media, education, management, finance, engineering, and arts and culture, with the President empowered to vary this composition by Federal Gazette order. The Director-General is the chief executive responsible for day-to-day business and is appointed under Section 5 by the Minister with the prior approval of the President. Although Section 6 of the Act contains a formal duty to provide “independent and impartial television broadcasting for general reception within Nigeria,” this duty is not supported by an arm’s-length appointment system, an independent funding settlement, a published editorial charter, an ombudsman or an external complaints mechanism, and the same statute preserves ministerial access and direction powers under Sections 8, 9 and 10.

The current Director-General is Salihu Abdulhamid Dembos, whose appointment trail reflects an unusual sequence of political reversals during the review period. Dembos was first appointed as the 12th DG by President Muhammadu Buhari on 21 September 2022 for a three-year tenure through then-Information Minister Lai Mohammed, after a 33-year NTA career that included roles as General Manager of NTA Lokoja and NTA Kano and Zonal Director at NTA Kaduna. In June 2023, the incoming Tinubu administration dissolved the boards of fourteen federal agencies including NTA; in October 2023, Tinubu reappointed Dembos as DG in a wave of public-media appointments. On 22 August 2025, in a statement issued by the Director of Information and Public Relations at the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Segun Imohiosen, Tinubu briefly removed Dembos and appointed Rotimi Pedro as DG, Stella Din Jacob as Executive Director, News, Karimah Bello as Executive Director, Marketing, and Sophia Essahmed as Managing Director of NTA Enterprises Limited. Approximately two weeks later, in early September 2025, Tinubu reversed those appointments via a statement from Special Adviser on Information and Strategy Bayo Onanuga, recalling both Dembos and Executive Director News Ayo Adewuyi (whose tenure runs to 2027) to complete their tenures. NTA staff at the Abuja headquarters were captured on video singing “Papa Oyoyo”, a children’s welcome-home song, to mark Dembos’s return.

The Chair of the Board of Directors is Felix Morka, the National Publicity Secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), appointed by Tinubu on 28 March 2025 alongside 22 other appointments, predominantly APC state chairmen and National Working Committee members, to chair the boards of federal institutions. Former Senator Shehu Sani publicly criticised the appointment as partisan, arguing that appointing the spokesperson of the ruling party to chair the federally owned broadcaster would “cast aspersions on its contents.” The board of executive directors appointed or reappointed in September 2024, Adewuyi having since been reinstated in September 2025, comprises Ayo Adewuyi (News), Ibrahim Aliyu (Special Duties), Muhammed Fatuhu Mustapha (Administration and Training), Apinke Effiong (Finance), Tari Taylaur (Programmes), Sadique Musa Omeiza (Engineering) and Oluwakemi Fashina (Marketing).

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 (where he is 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 State Media Monitor review identifies as a structural conflict-of-interest concern in the supervision of the federally owned broadcaster.

Source of funding and budget

NTA remains primarily funded through federal appropriations, supplemented by advertising revenue (estimated by industry observers at around 20 percent of total revenue) and other commercial income. The State Media Monitor baseline identified a 2023 allocation of approximately NGN 8.33 billion (around US$10.8 million at the time) through the then-Ministry of Information and Culture. More recent federal budget material points to substantially higher nominal allocations in 2025 and 2026, including an NTA-specific 2026 allocation of roughly NGN 19.11 billion across personnel, overhead and capital expenditure. These nominal increases should be interpreted against the steep depreciation of the naira after the 2023 currency reforms, which materially reduced the real-dollar value of nominal federal allocations.

Two longer-term figures illuminate the scale of state financial dependence. Between 2010 and 2019, NTA received cumulative federal subsidies of approximately NGN 67 billion (equivalent to around US$43 million at 2024 exchange rates); in 2020, the Federal Government pledged NGN 181.5 billion (then approximately US$500 million) to support the network’s digital transition under the Government’s terrestrial-digital migration programme, though implementation timelines and disbursement details remain opaque. The Tinubu administration’s federal budgets 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 NTA and other federal agencies. The structural picture across the review period is one of continued near-total fiscal dependence on the federal subvention model, with the digital-transition financing remaining the largest unresolved budgetary commitment.

In October 2021, then-Director-General Yakubu Mohammed publicly acknowledged at a National Assembly budget presentation the financial pressure from federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies that expected favourable coverage in return for paid advertisement spending, identifying the dependency relationship as a direct obstacle to NTA’s independent operation. The State Media Monitor review identifies this dependency, together with the absence of a published multi-year financial statement, as the principal structural vulnerability of NTA’s funding model.

Editorial independence

NTA’s founding statute mandates “independent and impartial television broadcasting for general reception within Nigeria,” but the same statute formalises a pathway for state influence by obligating the broadcaster to air government communiqués, ministerial speeches and other official content upon request. The State Media Monitor review records that NTA has historically functioned as a de facto mouthpiece of the federal government, with multiple media-monitoring reports and academic analyses documenting the network’s role in amplifying ruling-party narratives and limiting space for critical voices. NTA’s internal accountability framework rests on a Service Charter and the work of an internal Research, Development and Monitoring Unit whose daily monitoring reports are reviewed by senior management, but the State Media Monitor review found no public evidence that these mechanisms safeguard journalistic independence or function as effective accountability tools beyond internal quality control.

The board overhaul of September 2024 brought in industry-experienced executives, most notably ED Programmes Tari Taylaur, and NTA has launched new original programming including “Temi and the Labalaba Band” and “Las Gidi,” together with Nollywood-partnership content, in a push for cultural relevance and audience reinvention. The March 2025 appointment of APC National Publicity Secretary Felix Morka as Board Chair runs against that editorial reinvention: as the Foundation for Investigative Journalism’s analysis at the time of appointment put it, Morka’s dual role as ruling-party spokesperson and chair of the federal public broadcaster raises questions about press objectivity at the level where political and editorial direction intersect. The risk identified by independent observers is that editorial improvements in entertainment and cultural programming will be overshadowed by perceived or actual bias in news and political coverage.

These conditions place NTA firmly in the State-Controlled (SC) category. The broadcaster is a federal public corporation governed by the NTA Act, with its Authority/Board appointed through federal executive channels and its Director-General appointed by the minister subject to presidential approval. Although the Act formally requires independent and impartial broadcasting, that duty is not supported by arm’s-length appointment procedures, an independent funding settlement, a public editorial charter, an ombudsman or an external complaints mechanism; the same statute also preserves ministerial access and direction powers. NTA remains primarily dependent on federal appropriations, supplemented by limited commercial income, and its recent leadership history (the 2023 reappointment of Salihu Abdulhamid Dembos, the March 2025 appointment of APC National Publicity Secretary Felix Morka as Board Chair, the August 2025 attempted reshuffle and the September 2025 presidential reversal) demonstrates continuing executive and ruling-party influence over the broadcaster’s governance. The cultural-programming reinvention is a meaningful editorial development, but it does not alter the underlying ownership, appointment, funding or accountability architecture. The SC classification therefore continues to apply for 2026.

AI and digital policy

NTA maintains an active digital presence through its nta.ng news platform, YouTube live-streaming, and social-media channels including its LinkedIn corporate account and X handles for individual programmes. No NTA-specific published policy on AI-generated content, synthetic-media disclosure or content-provenance standards such as C2PA was identified during this review.

May 2026