“These restrict intellectual property rights and their scope of exploitation with whomsoever one chooses to collaborate. It is economic sabotage writ large, directed against thousands of practitioners. Regulatory? This is strangulation in effect!”
He noted that several practitioners’ voices have been raised in protest. “For one such insider’s detailed and passionate exposition on the deleterious provisions of this code, I shall draw particular attention of policymakers to Chris Ihidero’s Why Does the NBC Want to Kill Local Content in Nigeria? If I may invoke a contemporary tragic image to render graphically what Ihidero and others have pleaded on behalf of both creators and consumers of this artistic productivity: Let government kindly take its knee off the neck of this industry. Please – let it breathe!” Soyinka stated.
But a battle appears to be brewing between the governing board of the commission and its management over the same Broadcasting code.Prof. Armstrong Idachaba,the acting director-general, National Broadcasting Commission (NBC)  has said the commission is carrying out  a holistic review of the broadcast sector , as approved by President Muhammadu Buhari.
But the NBC board believes that the management has gone beyond its powers in issuing a new broadcast code without the buy-in of stakeholders especially the broadcast industry. 
Am unperturbed Idabacha who was at the Information Minister’s media briefing in Abuja,July7 said that the government would soon  enforce the ‘Pay as You Go’ directive to the Pay-Tv because it was in the interest of all.
The board had penultimate Friday placed advertisements in some national newspapers calling on aggrieved stakeholders in the broadcasting and entertainment industries to submit position papers on the amended code, according to some media reports.
But the NBC, in another advert signed by its acting Director-General, last Monday, had asked Nigerians to disregard the earlier one put out by the board.
However, Ikra Aliyu Bilbis, chairman, NBC board, told journalists in Abuja that it was wrong for the NBC’s top management staff to say the advert placed by the board had no official endorsement of the commission.
Bilbis, who alleged that some ministry officials were setting the NBC’s top management staff against the commission’s board, said protocols were being breached by the officials in their oversight of the broadcast regulatory agency.
He said as much the board agreed that Section 6 of the NBC Act conferred on the minister the power to give directives of a general character to the commission, the Act “however does not infer that the honourable minister can substitute the board by usurping the functions of the same board.”
He said there had never been a time in the history, tradition and conventions of the NBC when a presidential approval was needed for a review of the broadcasting code. He wondered why top management of NBC would choose not to listen to stakeholders who were shut out during the amendment.
Reacting, Mr Amstrong Idachaba, acting director-general, NBC, said that the commission “carried all the stakeholders along during the amendment’’.
Idachaba alleged that a stakeholder, who is a foreign company, was behind the campaign against the amended code. He said the company was kicking against the code because it erroneously believed that it would weaken its monopoly and brought Nigerian companies up to the same level as it.
“This is not so. Rather it would even give them more reach and more money”, he said.