THE Centre for Religion and Cultural Rights (CECURR) has given the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) 21 days to withdraw its threat to ban miracle broadcasts or face a legal action by the centre.
The centre, which issued the warning yesterday, said the proposed ban was a clear violation of the rights of the individuals involved to propagate their thoughts and religious beliefs through the media they considered effective for it.
According to the centre, “every citizen of Nigeria has a right to cultural and religious beliefs and no individual, group or authority, no matter how powerful, has the right to prevent any group from exercising and enjoying its rights under the law.”
The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) had, while announcing its proposed ban argued that miracles could not be verified since they could not be subjected to scientific investigation.
However, the centre said it had no problem with NBC if it considered a total ban on all religious broadcasts in the country rather than the present lopsided arrangement of selective banning of certain aspects of religious broadcast without a clear-cut principle, definition or criteria.
The Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria Inc. (PFN), in a statement last month, said it believed strongly that any supposed excesses that might currently be displayed in the media, which negated the ethics of objectivity and truth by any religious organisation should be checked through the appropriate channels.
The PFN, however, counselled that while it welcomed the NBC’s move to fashion ways of curtailing excesses in religious broadcasts, it should not adopt a blanket approach that might invariably “mix the wheat with the chaffs.”