Nigeria’s House of Representatives Ordered a Four-Week Probe Into a N1.2 Billion Copyright Levy in June 2026. The Deadline Passed With No Report, and the Group That Demanded the Probe Lost Its Own Case in July.

On 10 June 2026, Nigeria’s House of Representatives adopted a motion directing its Committee on Justice to investigate alleged irregularities in the administration of copyright matters in the country, with a report due back in four weeks. That deadline fell around 8 July 2026. No source read for this piece, through 9 October 2026, reports that the committee ever filed, tabled or published that report. In the same stretch of weeks, a separate and older court case resolved, and it went against the organisation whose public campaign had set the parliamentary probe in motion in the first place.

What triggered it

The motion did not come out of nowhere. On 19 February 2026, Tony Okoroji, chairman of the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), held a press conference at COSON House in Ikeja, Lagos, and accused Nigeria’s former Attorney-General, Abubakar Malami, of building what he called a “scam machine” inside the country’s copyright system. The claim centred on money. Okoroji said the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC), under Director-General John Asein, had just allocated N1.2 billion in Private Copy Levy funds, a statutory levy on blank media and recording devices meant to compensate rights owners, to the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria (MCSN) rather than to COSON. He also said MCSN had separately collected N2.7 billion from a judgment against MultiChoice Nigeria. Both figures come from COSON’s own statement, carried in full on its website and reported by SaharaReporters and New Telegraph; no court filing or NCC document setting out either sum was read for this record.

Okoroji’s underlying argument traced back to 2016 and 2017, when he says Malami directed the NCC to approve MCSN as a collective management organisation (CMO) without following the documentation, fee and evaluation steps required under the Copyright (Collective Management Organisation) Regulations 2007, and separately moved to withdraw seven criminal cases against MCSN officials. COSON’s press statement made ten demands, among them that the Federal Government dismantle what it called the Malami scheme, suspend any further distribution of levy money pending a transparent process, annul MCSN’s licence, reopen the seven criminal cases, order forensic audits of MCSN and the NCC, and remove Asein as NCC Director-General.

MCSN’s answer

MCSN did not let the accusation stand unanswered. In a statement reported by First Weekly Magazine on 2 June 2026, the society called Okoroji’s “scam machine” framing malicious, misleading and historically inaccurate. Its own timeline runs the other way: MCSN says it was founded in 1984 as Nigeria’s first collective management body, that COSON’s predecessor was created and approved only in 1995 with the backing of NCC leadership it says Okoroji himself influenced, and that MCSN spent more than two decades petitioning successive Attorneys-General and filing court cases before a House of Representatives Joint Committee directed the NCC, in a resolution adopted on 18 December 2013, to approve it. MCSN’s approval followed in 2017. It also points to a Federal High Court judgment of 13 February 2018 that dismissed a COSON lawsuit challenging that approval, and calls it “treacherous” that Okoroji, whom it says once urged Malami not to approve MCSN, is now accusing Malami and the NCC of wrongdoing for doing exactly what the National Assembly had directed.

The probe nobody has reported finishing

The parliamentary motion grew out of that public standoff. According to the National Assembly Library Trust Fund (naltf.gov.ng), the official National Assembly research institution, and corroborated independently by Leadership, the House motion was sponsored by Hon. Nkemkanma Kama, who represents the Ohaozara, Onicha and Ivo federal constituency of Ebonyi State. Kama cited the public outcry from COSON and a coalition of musicians, authors, composers and performers, and argued the allegations, “if established, may have significant implications for the protection of intellectual property rights, the creative industry and the livelihoods of Nigerian artists and rights holders.” The House grounded the inquiry in Section 88 of the 1999 Constitution, which gives the National Assembly power to investigate the conduct of public affairs, and directed the Committee on Justice to interface with the Federal Ministry of Justice, the NCC and collective management organisations, with four weeks to report back.

Four weeks from 10 June 2026 runs out around 8 July 2026. Nothing found on nass.gov.ng, in Leadership’s own later coverage, or anywhere else searched for this record indicates the Committee on Justice ever sat publicly, took evidence, or filed the report the House ordered. The full text of the motion itself was not located on nass.gov.ng either; what is known about its wording comes from the two outlets that reported on its adoption, not from the motion document.

A different court, a different loss

While that legislative clock was running out unreported, an older and unrelated piece of COSON litigation reached a conclusion. On 9 July 2026, the Court of Appeal in Lagos dismissed an interlocutory appeal COSON had brought against the NCC, reported by SaharaReporters on 1 August 2026. The underlying dispute had nothing to do with the levy motion: COSON had asked the Federal High Court, in a 2020 suit, to restrain the NCC from revoking or interfering with its own operating licence, and the Federal High Court refused, a decision COSON then appealed. The Court of Appeal upheld that refusal, and in doing so stated plainly that COSON’s own approval as a collective management organisation had been suspended in April 2018 and had expired by effluxion of time in May 2019, before the underlying suit was even filed. The court’s reasoning was narrow, that an injunction cannot be used to restrain an act that has already happened, but the practical effect is that the same organisation leading a national campaign to have MCSN’s licence annulled has, on the public record of a Court of Appeal judgment, gone without a valid CMO licence of its own since 2019. MCSN has since cited that ruling in its own public statements, published by First Weekly Magazine on 17 August 2026, to warn music users against paying anyone claiming to issue licences in COSON’s name.

That is a contradiction worth sitting with rather than smoothing over. COSON’s parliamentary campaign asks the National Assembly to treat MCSN’s 2017 approval as illegitimate. The Court of Appeal ruling does not touch that question at all, it is about COSON’s own licence, not MCSN’s, and it was an interlocutory ruling on an injunction rather than a final judgment on the substance. But it lands in the same window as the unreported parliamentary deadline, and any reader trying to work out which CMO has the stronger claim to represent Nigerian musicians right now has to hold both facts at once: a House motion treating COSON’s complaint as credible enough to investigate, and an appellate court record showing COSON itself has operated for years without the licence it says MCSN obtained improperly.

What is not established

No independent financial document was read to confirm the N1.2 billion levy allocation or the N2.7 billion (MCSN’s own account says N2.5 billion) MultiChoice figure; both numbers rest on the parties’ public statements to each other through the press, not on a filing or NCC disclosure. Whether the Committee on Justice held hearings, took written submissions, or produced any internal findings could not be established, nor could whether it still intends to report. The exact case number for the 9 July 2026 Court of Appeal judgment was given inconsistently across the coverage read and is not stated here for that reason. Nothing read states that any of the disputed levy money has moved, been frozen, or been returned since February 2026; this is a fight over who has authority to license and distribute, not a reported transaction with funds changing hands.

What this means for artists

MCSN is no stranger to this kind of dispute over the same levy money: a separate Lagos court freeze tied to the same N1.2 billion tranche, brought by a coalition of record labels rather than COSON, has sat unresolved since February 2026.

No master recording and no publishing catalogue is in play here. What is in play is something more structural and, for a working Nigerian musician, arguably more important day to day: which organisation is legally entitled to collect money on an artist’s behalf and pass it on, and whether the regulator overseeing that system is seen as doing so fairly. A songwriter or performer registered with one society and not the other has no straightforward way to know, from public reporting alone, whether the body holding their money has a secure legal footing. COSON says the NCC’s 2017 decision and the levy allocation that followed it favour an organisation it considers improperly approved. MCSN says COSON’s own campaign comes from a rival that has not held a valid licence since 2019 and lost the appeal that might have changed that. The National Assembly was asked to referee the dispute and, on the public record checked for this piece, has not yet said anything back. Until either the Committee on Justice publishes a finding or a court rules on the substance of MCSN’s approval rather than on an interlocutory injunction, any Nigerian artist relying on a collecting society to get levy money or performance royalties to them is relying on an administrative structure that two separate organs of the Nigerian state, a court and a parliamentary committee, have left unresolved in public at the same time.