Tackling the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of convergence in Nigeria

The director general of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Yomi Bolarinwa, is angry with the media, particularly those reporting the telecom sector. He thinks the controversy over convergence in Nigeria is a media thing. As the country’s broadcasting regulator, he thinks the media created the controversy over the impeding fusion of the NBC and the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), the overseer of the country’s telecom sector.

According to Bolarinwa the media created the impression that the NCC will take over the NBC in a skewed interpretation of the superiority of telecoms over broadcasting. Telecom reporters gave convergence such a narrow meaning that they felt all that there was about convergence was the mixture of broadcast and telecom and, of course, gave an almost illiterate impression of the ultimate conquest of broadcasting by telecom in the converged environment.

I tried to empathize with Bolarinwa as I listened to him in his office that Wednesday morning in Abuja, Nigeria’s political capital. All over the world where policy makers have had to contend with convergence, they have had to work around a mix of controversies ranging from the political to the technological.

They have also had to work around the economy of the convergence and its social impact in arriving at a decision. In Nigeria, convergence has stirred its own debate reflecting the peculiarities of the Nigerian environment and the understanding or lack of it that the media has of the issue, to reason along with Bolarinwa.

But the media did not create the convergence controversy; it merely joined the controversy and has helped to raise awareness on the issue from different perspectives. An angry Bolarinwa may be right to the extent that the media has unduly created the impression that the fusion of the two regulatory bodies for broadcasting and telecom should be hinged on making the NBC a department within the NCC. But convergence is far more than the marriage of telecom and broadcasting.

As rightly expressed by Sunday Folayan, CEO of Skannet, the biggest ISP in Ibadan city, south-west Nigeria, convergence also refers to an evident blur within the industries themselves, such as the convergence between the fixed and mobile telecommunication services that hitherto have been treated as discrete markets and segments.

As wrongly depicted by most ICT reporters in Nigeria, convergence does not necessarily mean the merger of policies; rather, it is the creation of the enabling environment to operate these policies effectively. To quote Folayan, when regulatory authorities are to be merged, the government “must ensure that individual roles have clear policies guiding them before such platforms are brought together.”

The truth is that convergence has come to be associated with some of the controversies stirred by the emergence of disruptive technologies; the chief culprit is IP (Internet Protocol). IP brought the soft switches – convergence and the possibility of unifying thickly independent sectors. Now, the marketplace mantra is one pipe, several channels, multiple services and optimized spectrum. Read the views of renowned Canadian telecom analyst Kate Wild: “What is convergence?

"Convergence has been made possible by digitalization which allows different types of content (audio, video, text) to be stored in the same format and delivered through a wide variety of technologies (computers, mobile phones, televisions, etc). There are therefore two broad definitions of convergence: technological and media or content. Definitions are shaped to some extent by the context in which they are offered.

"Technological convergence refers to the trend for some set of technologies initially having distinct functionalities to evolve to having those that overlap; it occurs when multiple products come together to form one product with the advantages of all of them -- e.g. your computer as purveyor of voice as well as text and graphics; cell phones that provide text and graphics as well as voice. Convergence in the media refers to the removal of entry barriers across the IT, telecoms, media and consumer electronics industries, creating one large ‘converged’ industry."

Kate offers a generic, maybe a realistic, view of convergence and tries to stay clear of the controversy. The analyst says: "…convergence is a process, not an end point"

But adaptation to convergence is not an end point. Changes will continue in technologies and in the uses to which they are put by human ingenuity. Convergence represents an unstoppable and irreversible dynamic. The question is not whether to address convergence – but how and when.

It is the how and when that have caused all the arguments, and thankfully, many regulatory climates are beginning to adopt a more proactive approach at getting into the kernel of the "how and when" of convergence. Kenya has fused its different regulatory authorities to join other regulatory environments with which it now shares a kindred spirit: South Africa, India, the U.K., and several others spread across developing and developed economies.

The Nigerian government has accepted to fuse the regulators in Nigeria amidst a deluge of arguments that many stakeholders think are misplaced. But both the NBC and NCC regulators believe fusion would augur well for the industry. They also seem to agree that it is the noisy and uncharitable debates on the "how" of the fusion that is making convergence to look like the nemesis of change, whereas, and ironically, convergence is change in constant replay.

Convergence does not erase the distinct parallel lines within technologies in spite of the reality of fusion; it merely identifies areas of common grounds for harmonized and effective regulation. Telecom and broadcasting have converged, but they still retain elements of their primitive or inherent challenges. Telephony is still private conversation, even if done as teleconferencing; broadcasting remains a social service impacting on the psyche of millions of people, even if it passes through a telephone pipe and invades the privacy of viewers and listeners. The essentials of each service would remain, and the regulatory approach would be distinct. Broadcasting would demand regulatory stance on content and certainly not telephony. In between all these, it is the duty of government to identify the point at which fused regulation would happen, and the regulators appear not to disagree on the ‘how.’ It is government business to decide the when, not the regulators. That is why the Nigerian government must act fast and wisely in fusing the regulatory authorities that oversee the telecom and broadcast media. Now is the time to act and end the lopsided arguments over how to fuse the two bodies.