UNILAG Inaugurates TV Station for Educational Advancement

Funmi Ogundare

The University of Lagos (UNILAG) recently inaugurated its television station Channel 184, which will serve as a reference point for educational advancement, documentaries, quality entertainment and sports.

The station will also promote the culture of its immediate communities by regularly highlighting their ideas, languages, customs, folklores and social behaviours in line with the provision of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC)’s Code.

Briefing journalists on the development recently, the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Oluwatoyin Ogundipe said the TV station would also have a time belt for its distance learning teaching packages and would also be deployed to keep its students and wider community informed of developments in the university through the dedication of one hour to UNILAG news.

“UNILAG TV Channel 184 will also serve as an instructional facility for our distance learning students,” he said, adding that the station will fly on the platform of Star Times Digital Broadcasting.

“With state-of-the-art equipment and technical facilities in place, the TV station will deliver premier local, national and international news as they unfold, and become the most trusted news source in Nigeria by being impartial, creative, factual and credible, timely and innovative. Our team of world class professionals would inject fresh ideas and energies that would take broadcasting to the next level in Nigeria.”

He recalled when the institution pioneered its campus radio broadcasting in the country in 2004, adding that when President Muhammadu Buhari approved its TV license in November 9, 2017; it was cheery news celebrated among its three campuses.

“It has always being our dream to have a television station. In tandem with Walt Disney quotation that if you can dream it, you can do it, the University of Lagos has blazed the trail again by establishing the first campus television station not only in Nigeria, but in the whole of West Africa.

“To see to the actualisation of the noble dream of having a functioning TV station, I constituted the University of Lagos Multi Media Ventures Board under the leadership of Professor Muyiwa Faleye in April 2008 to mid-wife the speedy actualisation of the project.”

Ogundipe said the Multi Media Venture will operate as a private body organisation without the interference of the management of the institution, adding that the members should be able to run it effectively, employ staff and ensure it is competitive.

“It is a TV station given to the university; we must operate in such a way that it will be competitive. The things that they will not bring in are those things not approved in the university like sexual explicit adventures. We will monitor it such that what we have in other stations will not be allowed, but there will be an interplay between entertainment and research,” he said.

The VC expressed hope that before the end of the year when the National Universities Commission (NUC) is conducting its ranking, the university will be commended for its efforts.

He envisaged a bigger picture of the TV station, saying that within a year, it should be able to cover the whole country.

While thanking the president for granting the institution the TV license to operate and the board members for a job well done, Ogundipe said students can have the opportunity to use the station as their laboratory to showcase themselves.

“It will not be limited for students only from Mass Communication Department; there are many talents in many faculties, we just did training in the entrepreneurship centre and we found out that students in the medical school came first and those in the Faculty of Law came first at the pitching, and they performed excellently well. It is because there are potential deposited in them. So what we intend to do is to ignite the potential so that they could be celebrated all over the world.”