Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos, who is also direc¬tor, Buhari-Osinbajo campaign fund-raising com¬mittee, says President Good¬luck Jonathan will do well in the spirit of last week’s peace agreement with candidates of other political parties in the February polls, to prevail on the Nigerian Communi¬cations Commission (NCC) to open the shut SMS platform designed to raise funds for the APC presidential campaign Fashola said at a news conference in Lagos that within the first day of open¬ing the platform to the pub¬lic, over 4,500 had made donations via text messages to the short code, 35350, which was available on all networks, before it was shut down by the NCC.
A letter from the NCC titled, ‘Political and Parti¬san Advertisements’, dated January 19, 2015 and ad¬dressed to the managing director of Emerging Mar¬kets Telecommunication, which Fashola released to the media, warned all ser¬vice providers to steer clear partisan advertisements.
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The letter reads, “The commission wishes to advise all service providers to avoid running political advertise-ments/promotion that will portray them as being par¬tisan. The commission will not hesitate to sanction any service provider that will flout this directive.”
A source within the commission further told BusinessDay that there have been complaints by the general public against unsolicited text messages which compelled the NCC and stakeholders in the in¬dustry to meet and resolve to put a check to them.
But Fashola accused the NCC of double standard, brandishing another letter with which the same com¬mission gave an approval to another service provider, Wagitel Communications Limited, in 2010 prior to the 2011 general elections, to use a similar platform to raise funds for Goodluck-Sambo presidential ticket.
