In January 2025, musicians across Chad were paid out of the small annual fees that bars, restaurants and nightclubs owe for playing recorded music. They were not paid by the institution that, according to the country’s own law, owes them the most: ONAMA, Chad’s state broadcaster.
The payment, launched on 17 January 2025 by the Maison des Patrimoines Culturels du Tchad working with BUTDRA, Chad’s sole copyright collecting society, was explicitly framed by its own organiser as a stopgap. BUTDRA (Bureau Tchadien du Droit d’Auteur) was created under Law No. 005/PR/2003, which gives it the exclusive national mandate to license public performances of music, collect royalties from venues, broadcasters and event organisers, and distribute the proceeds to the songwriters and performers it represents. The money that went out in January 2025 covered royalties for 2024, and it came entirely from BUTDRA’s existing collections from small commercial venues, each paying a flat annual fee reported at 50,000 CFA francs.
What did not go out was any money from ONAMA (Office National des Médias Audiovisuels), the state broadcasting institution formed in 2017 and 2018 out of the former ONRTV, which runs Radio Tchad, Télé Tchad and a network of regional stations under the Ministry of Communication. Chadian press reporting at the time said ONAMA is required to devote 6 percent of its annual budget to copyright royalties, reflecting its position as the country’s single largest broadcaster of Chadian music, and that it had not kept that commitment. Artists’ representatives put the duration of the shortfall at three to four years.
Two coordinators, two numbers, no reconciliation#
How much ONAMA actually owes is where the public record gets uncomfortable for anyone trying to write the number down cleanly. Tchadinfos, reporting the January 2025 payout, quoted Masngar Jonas Massingo, coordinator of the Coordination Nationale des Artistes Tchadiens, putting the ONAMA debt at 190 million CFA francs. Two days later, VOA Afrique quoted a different coordinator of the country’s artists’ platforms, Dounia Tog-yangar, giving a different figure: 195 million CFA francs, which he said artists were owed “by right.”
Neither number comes from an ONAMA financial statement, an audit, or a figure attributed to anyone inside ONAMA. Across six primary accounts of this story read for this piece, including two separate VOA Afrique reports and a write-up in the Senegalese outlet Impact.sn, no ONAMA official is named, quoted, or given a chance to respond. The debt exists, in the public record, only as something artists’ coordinators say is owed to them. That does not make it untrue. It does make it a claim this piece can report as disputed and sourced to the artists’ side, not as a confirmed liability on ONAMA’s books.
Tog-yangar’s own description of the January payout was blunt: artists were told to take what he called “les miettes” (the crumbs), roughly 45,000 CFA francs per artist by some accounts, while continuing to press for the full sum. Saleh Mahamat Ahmat, the coordinator general of the Maison des Patrimoines Culturels du Tchad who helped organise the stopgap, described it in almost the same terms to VOA Afrique: “une solution aléatoire,” a random, improvised fix, pending an actual royalty payment that had not yet happened.
A march that never happened#
Ten days before the payout, on 7 January 2025, Chad’s Minister of Public Security banned a march that artists’ platforms had planned for the following day, citing the risk of public disorder, nationwide. The ban order itself, reported by Alwihda Info, names no cause for the march at all. Tchadinfos’ own report on the royalty payout places the banned march in the same paragraph as the ONAMA debt, introduced with the phrase “à ce sujet,” on this subject, which links the two events contextually without stating outright that the march was about royalties. No source checked for this piece makes that connection explicitly. It is a reasonable inference from the timing and the placement in the one article that mentions both. It is not a confirmed fact, and this piece is not treating it as one.
Eighteen months later, still nothing on the record#
Checking forward from January 2025 to the most recent available reporting turns up nothing that resolves either figure, or confirms ONAMA ever paid any part of the disputed sum. ONAMA’s own website carries coverage of a board of directors meeting in June 2026 that set the institution’s priorities for the year, and of an audit launched in July 2026 by Chad’s independent anti-corruption authority into ONAMA’s management procedures. Neither mentions copyright, royalties, or BUTDRA. If the debt has been paid down since January 2025, the institutions involved have not said so anywhere this desk could find, in either French-language Chadian press or on ONAMA’s own site.
BUTDRA’s own history, separate from this specific dispute, is one of chronic underfunding. In a 2023 interview with the Chadian outlet ATPE, BUTDRA’s director general, Moundinet Tchinpah, described an organisation that struggles to enforce its own mandate: companies and broadcasters that ignore formal notices, court orders obtained by some payers to avoid paying at all, and no tools to investigate piracy from its own offices. An earlier account, published by Music In Africa in 2017, quoted an unnamed BUTDRA official saying the office had never received an operating fund from the state at all. The ONAMA dispute is not a one-off breakdown. It is the latest documented instance of a collecting society that has spent roughly two decades short of the money and the enforcement power its own founding law gives it.
What this means for artists#
For a Chadian musician whose work is broadcast on state radio or television, this story has a specific, practical meaning: the royalty you are legally owed for that airplay depends on an institution, ONAMA, that multiple artists’ coordinators say has not been paying its share for years, and whose side of the story is not on the public record anywhere this desk could find. The money you did receive in January 2025 did not come from that airplay. It came from the unrelated flat fees BUTDRA collects from bars and restaurants, redirected as an emergency measure while the actual debt sat unresolved.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to understand what a Chadian broadcast credit is actually worth in practice, as opposed to what Chad’s 2003 copyright law says it should be worth. This piece makes one claim and one claim only, each tied to a document: that a 2024-royalty payout happened on 17 January 2025, funded from venue fees; that two named artists’ coordinators, in the same week, gave two different figures for what ONAMA owes; and that nothing in the public record since shows ONAMA paying either figure. It does not claim to know which figure is correct, whether ONAMA disputes owing anything at all, or whether the debt has since been settled quietly. Those are the open questions a document from ONAMA itself, which this desk could not locate, would resolve.
