Radio came to Nigeria as a wired loudspeaker, not a wireless one. On 1 December 1932 the colonial P&T inaugurated the Radio Distribution Service (RDS) in Lagos — a relay station on Marina that received the BBC Empire Service shortwave broadcast from Daventry and re-distributed it over copper telephone-style 'wired wireless' lines to subscribers' homes at a flat rental of 10 shillings a month. The subscriber owned no receiver; he or she rented a small mahogany 'rediffusion' loudspeaker box with a single volume knob and no tuning dial. By 1939 the RDS had 1,170 boxes in Lagos and a smaller installation at Ibadan (1939) and Kano (1944). For most colonial Nigerians the first voice they ever heard from outside the village was the BBC newsreader's plummy 'This is London calling.'
Proper wireless broadcasting arrived only in April 1951 with the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS), organised by T.W. Chalmers of the BBC under the Turner-Byron Commission report (1949). NBS used a 10-kilowatt medium-wave transmitter at Ikoyi and, for the first time, broadcast in Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo alongside English. The 1956 NBS Act converted it into the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) — an unfortunate acronym share with the American network. In 1976 the federal government merged NBC with the regional broadcasters into the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), headquartered at Ikoyi.
The political weight of radio in Nigeria peaked in 1966–70. Radio Kaduna's broadcast on the night of 15 January 1966 announcing Major Nzeogwu's coup, and Lt-Col Ojukwu's 30 May 1967 declaration of Biafra over Radio Enugu, made it clear that whoever held the transmitter held the message. Both Federal and Biafran sides spent more on transmitter capacity during the war than on any other communications technology. After the war the deregulation by Decree 38 of 1992 finally broke FRCN's monopoly — Raypower 100.5 FM (Lagos, 1994), Nigeria's first private broadcast station, went on air under Raymond Dokpesi's DAAR Communications. Today Nigeria has over 600 licensed radio stations, and radio still reaches more Nigerians (78%) than any other medium except mobile telephony.
Adoption lag: BBC first daily broadcast (2LO London) 1922 → Lagos RDS 1932 = 10 years for the relay, but 29 years for genuine wireless broadcasting (BBC 1922 → NBS 1951). The relay model — subscribers paying rent for boxes they could not tune — encoded the colonial preference for a one-way, government-controlled signal.