US to fund new anti-Boko Haram ‘Arewa TV’

As part of its engagement with Nigeria to fight insurgency, the US will fund a new 24-hour satellite TV channel in the northern part of the country, the New York Times has reported.

The station will be called Arewa TV, according to the American newspaper in its Friday June 7 edition, and will produce original content, focusing mainly on “themes that reject political violence and violent extremism”.

It will not broadcast “news or political reporting” and will be targeted at reconstructing the minds of the youth who have been exposed to violent extremism from childhood.

It will be produced in Nigeria “by Nigerians”, and will be broadcast in Hausa, the lingua franca of northern Nigeria.

Boko Haram has made some parts of northern Nigeria ungovernable with a campaign of extreme violence that has consumed over 10,000 lives since 2009, according to estimates by President Goodluck Jonathan.

The recent kidnap of hundreds of schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, has further put the militants’ activities under global spotlight, with many western countries offering to help Nigeria in its war against terror.

Arewa TV is meant to “support Nigerian efforts to provide an attractive alternative to the messaging of violent extremists”, according to an unnamed US officer who did not give details of the project but simply said it was “under way”.

The discussions with Nigeria began in 2012, the official said, and the project is now almost completed and ready for take-off.

The State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism is financing the project with about $6 million, the newspaper reported, but this will be for only two years.

It is going to similar to the programmes run in Yemen and Pakistan, sponsored by State Department and run by Equal Access International, a government contractor based in San Francisco.

Yemen and Pakistan have been battling with terrorism for years.

The Arewa TV project will also provide training to northern journalists, the New York Times reported.

The official did not state if the Nigerian government would be involved in the project at any stage.