In December 2025, Niger’s statutory copyright office said it had ended a five-year standoff. The country’s modern bus companies, organised under the Organisation Patronale des Gares Modernes du Niger, agreed to pay an annual flat fee for the music played on their routes, something they had refused to do since roughly 2020. Two months later, on 25 February 2026, the office’s director, Zarami Fadji Katiella, told Niamey’s state press that this was part of a broader win: mobile operators Moov Niger, Zamani Télécoms, Airtel Niger and Niger Télécom were paying on time, as was the Canal+ satellite bouquet and the company Nestlé. Musicians, she said, would “soon” share in the proceeds, “dans un avenir proche.”
That is the claim. Here is the record. The same office told a different reporter in November 2018 that it had held no official ceremony distributing royalties to artists “for several years,” and that collecting from users was difficult even then. In March 2020, musicians were already calling its payouts, when they came at all, flat-rate and derisory. And on 18 May 2026, three months after promising artists a share “soon,” the office’s own next public act was not a payment. It was a workshop to rewrite the law, and a promise to hold a first-ever dialogue session with artists, with no date attached.
What the law actually requires#
Niger’s governing text is Ordonnance N°2010-95 of 23 December 2010, on copyright, related rights and traditional cultural expressions. It is specific about who is supposed to both collect and pay out. Article 27 says the equitable remuneration owed for private copying “est perçue et distribuée par le Bureau Nigérien du Droit d’Auteur,” collected and distributed by BNDA, in that single clause. Article 64 covers broadcast and public communication of a commercial phonogram: the user owes a single equitable remuneration to BNDA, split 50 per cent to the producer and 50 per cent to the performers. Article 79 then names the body: a public professional institution holds exclusive authority in Niger to issue exploitation licences and “percevoir et repartir les redevances,” collect and redistribute the royalties, and venues or broadcasters cannot get an operating authorisation from any Nigerien administration without first showing BNDA’s own licence.
The law, in other words, does not leave distribution as an aspiration. It is the other half of the same sentence as collection. Nothing in the text that this desk could locate sets a distribution deadline or frequency, which is the gap the rest of this record turns on.
The collection side, on BNDA’s own account, is a real story#
Give the office its due on half of the ledger. The February 2026 account of the transport-company agreement is specific: a named employers’ body, a stated five-year dispute, and a settled mechanism, a flat annual fee per company rather than a per-passage levy. The list of other payers is also specific and named, not a vague reference to “users.” A 2020 joint ministerial decree is cited as the instrument that made every category of user liable. None of this is a thin claim.
What is missing from the same account is any figure. No franc amount is given for what the transport deal is worth, what the telecom companies pay, or what has been collected in total in any year. The announcement is about who now pays, not how much, and not what happens to the money afterward.
The distribution side has not moved since 2018#
Set the February 2026 claim against what the same office said about the other half of its job in earlier reporting. In November 2018, director Fadji told a trade reporter: “Nous avons mis en place plusieurs stratégies mais il est difficile de faire les recouvrements normalement,” we have put several strategies in place but it is difficult to carry out collections normally. The same report stated plainly that no official royalty distribution ceremony had been organised by BNDA “depuis plusieurs années,” for several years, and that artists had stopped believing royalties would come at all. That is the reporter’s own framing, not a quote from a named artist, and it should be read as such.
By March 2020, something had changed, but not by much. Artists interviewed were criticising BNDA’s “système des distributions forfaitaires,” its system of flat-rate distributions, as too low. One figure survives in that reporting: a flat payout that “peut atteindre trois à quatre millions par groupe,” can reach three to four million per group. The currency is not stated in the text, and neither is the period the figure covers or how many groups actually received it, so it cannot be read as an annual distribution total. Fadji’s response to the criticism was to defend Niger’s legal framework as not behind other countries’, and to blame the shortfall on “l’imperfection du processus d’enregistrements des œuvres artistiques dans les registres par les régisseurs,” imprecise logging of which songs were actually played, by the station staff who keep the radio and television logs BNDA uses to calculate who is owed what.
Then, in May 2026, a meeting instead of a number#
The next dated, on-the-record BNDA event after the February transport announcement came on 18 May 2026, when the office convened a workshop, opened on behalf of the youth, sports and culture ministry, to validate a draft ordinance meant to replace the 2010 law with one suited to “digital change,” better protection for traditional cultural expressions, and harmonised regional rules. At that same event, Fadji announced that BNDA would hold the first edition of what she called the “Rentrée du Droit d’Auteur,” framed as a space for dialogue between the office and artists. No date, venue or agenda beyond that framing was given.
Read the two 2026 announcements together and the pattern is plain. In February, the public message was that collection had widened and a payout was coming soon. In May, with no payout reported in between, the public message had shifted to legal reform and a future conversation. Niger’s musicians went from being told a number was coming to being told a meeting was coming.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Nigerien songwriter or performer, BNDA remains the only body with the legal standing to collect broadcast and private-copying royalties on your behalf, and nothing here suggests you should stop registering with it: the tariff base is real, and a growing list of named companies says it is paying into it. But nothing in the public record tells you what you would actually receive, or when. The last specific figure for an actual payout anyone could find is an unverified, undated “three to four million per group” from 2020 reporting, and the most recent commitment on timing is “soon,” offered in February 2026 and not repeated with a number by May.
If you licence Nigerien repertoire from outside the country, treat BNDA as a collection point for local statutory tariffs, not as evidence of who owns or administers a given work; its registry was not checked here for coverage, and direct clearance with a rights holder remains the safer route for anything beyond the broadcast and private-copying remuneration the ordinance assigns to it.
Niger is not an isolated case among small, state-linked collecting societies on this continent. Burundi’s own office has told reporters it will inform artists “as soon as it is ready,” with no distribution total ever published, and Chad’s state broadcaster let small bar and restaurant fees cover a royalty payment it was supposed to fund itself. What makes Niger’s record distinct is the timing: a specific, named collection win announced in February, and a specific, named process announced in May, with no distribution announced in between either month, or in the eight years before them.
