been apprehended by the Department of State Security operatives. The suspect as Daily
Sun exclusively gathered yesterday was being transported to Abuja as at Press time of
filling this report.
It is believed that the Enugu-based accomplice assisted the main radio pirate in London
by placing not so large equipment on abandoned NITEL transmission polls and a few
transmitters owned by other mobile telecom providers.
This is even as the Director-General of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC),
Emeka Mba, in an exclusive chat with Daily Sun on the issue, said the satellite signals
from the malicious station will be blocked from reaching Nigeria by the end of
yesterday (Thursday).
The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Information, Shade Yemi-Esan, had on
Wednesday told State House Correspondents after a meeting with President
Muhammadu Buhari that NBC had successfully jammed the signals of station.
Mba, who declined comment on the arrest of the accomplice of the radio station which
he said sent signals to Nigeria through a London-based content provider, however,
noted that beyond jamming the signals, once it is discovered to have hacked into a
Nigerian station, the commission was optimistic of completely cutting off its ability to
broadcast in the country via satellite yesterday.
He denied the rumor that the commission was slow at clamping down on the station
which he described as broadcasting nonsensical garbage. The NBC had to “catch the
station in the act” before taking action.
He said: “When they were broadcasting on the internet it was not much an issue, until
they started appropriating FM frequencies in various cities across the South East and it
became for us an urgent national security matter. We had to trace them. They are
using more sophisticated equipment and we had to upgrade our own equipment to
track them. To be honest it was difficult dealing with them because they are on satellite
and while we are able to neutralise the terrestrial frequencies on the FM band, satellite
is very a different thing, and they are outside Nigeria where you have different protocols
with how you deal with this issue. They also online and you know how difficult it is to
deal with this kind of thing online.
“But then again they are as using what we call frequency agile transmitters through
which they hop from one frequency to another. So once you block them in one
frequency, they move to another. So what we have done is to upgrade our capacity to
follow and block them where ever they are transmitting. To give you and instance, they
were transmitting through 104.7 FM Enugu yesterday (Wednesday), they moved to
102.1 FM Enugu and we also jammed it. This is why it is more important for us to
catch them than the process of jamming.
“I can assure everyone that these people will be caught and we will support the security
agencies to ensure that they face the full wrath of the law. It is no longer a matter of
running a pirate station. It is now a matter of subverting the state. There is a possibility
of it becoming a matter of sedition as some of the content of the broadcast is
declaring war on Nigeria. Our job at the NBC is to use our technical capacity to ensure
that we are able to neutralise them wherever they crop up. I am confident that before
the end of today we should be able to take them off satellite. This will deal a major
blow to their ability to send signal to Nigeria from where they are based abroad.
Source : The Sun
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