Dr. Abubakar Garba

Summary

Broadcast engineer and entrepreneur. Founder of the first licensed satellite-fed cable subscription television operator in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan West Africa. Under the early-1990s liberalisation of Nigerian broadcasting (Decree No. 38 of 1992 establishing the National Broadcasting Commission), Dr. Garba secured one of the first private subscription-television operator licences issued by the NBC and rolled out a closed-circuit, multi-channel satellite-fed cable service in Nigeria from the mid-1990s — predating the scaled rollout of MultiChoice / DStv in Nigeria and the entry of HiTV (2007) into the local subscription-TV market. His work established the regulatory template, the head-end engineering standard and the consumer subscription model on which every Nigerian Pay-TV operator since has been built.

Documented contributions

• 01Pioneer Nigerian and Sub-Saharan West African operator licensed for private satellite-fed cable subscription television under NBC Decree 38 of 1992
• 02Founder and pioneer engineer of Nigeria's first commercial multi-channel cable-television head-end
• 03Established the technical and regulatory template subsequently adopted by every Nigerian Pay-TV operator (MultiChoice, HiTV, StarTimes, TStv)
• 04Pioneered the satellite uplink/downlink and subscriber-management systems that underpin the Nigerian Pay-TV market today
• 05Long-standing public advocate for indigenous broadcast-content quotas in Nigerian subscription television