Members of Nigeria’s biggest copyright collective management organization, Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), have risen from their 2023 Annual General Meeting held on Tuesday, November 7, 2023 unanimously adopting a resolution requesting President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to immediately sack Mr. John Asein, Director-General of the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC).
According to the COSON members, Mr. John Asein’s leadership of the NCC is infested with evil, leaving the commission to continuously go backwards instead of forward. The members of COSON also resolved that they have completely lost respect for the leadership of John Asein and that they are certain that the Copyright Commission cannot make progress under him.
The resolution moved by Uche Emeka Paul, a Gospel music minister and COSON member from Abuja and seconded by Richard Ayodele Cole from Lagos and Angus Power Nwangwu from Enugu State, stated that there are many reasons for the request for the immediate sack of John Asein.
In his motion, Uche Emeka Paul held, “Let it be said loudly that President Bola Tinubu’s stated determination to boost Nigeria’s creative economy to provide jobs for the teeming masses of young Nigerians will be a pipe dream with a man like John Asein left in the critical position that he occupies”.
Emeka Paul’s motion went on to say, “A proper investigation will show that in the last five years, several indicting petitions with unassailable facts have been sent to the government about Asein’s rabid infractions of public service rules and extant laws which have eroded any respect for him by the staff of the Copyright Commission and which have negatively affected the growth of Nigeria’s creative sector.
“Under the immediate past government, Mr. Asein was shielded by the powers that be to the extent that he began to feel that he is untouchable. Since the arrival of the Tinubu government, Asein has assumed a low profile, hiding under the radar and praying that he will escape the gale of sacks that have visited Directors-General of government agencies. If the government is serious about a period of renewed hope for Nigerians, John Ohi Asein should go. Indeed, he should have been one of the first to go”.
Stated the motion, “Among his many infractions, there is abundant and incontrovertible evidence that John Asein, for several months, fraudulently collected salaries from the Federal Government when he was not staff of the Federal Government. The details are within the possession of the Code of Conduct Bureau and the ICPC. Asein and his henchmen have tried to cover up this scandal and sweep it under the carpet but the scandal will not go away.
“There is also abundant and incontrovertible evidence that long after being appointed DG of the NCC, John Asein continued to act on behalf of REPRONIG, a collective management organization licensed and regulated by the NCC and acted as sole signatory to the bank accounts of REPRONIG, signing REPRONIG funds in dollars to himself. This is another bewildering scandal and a terrible example of conflict of interest and fraud which Asein thinks he has successfully covered up with the help of his friends in government.
“Without shame, John Asein has continued to collect handouts from an organization he is said to be regulating without any thought of the ethics or morality of a referee collecting money from one of the teams in a match in which he is umpire. It is open secret that Asein collected a bus and laptops from this organization. The consequence is that Mr. Asein is shamelessly doing the bidding of the said organization as pay back for what he has collected”.
The Gospel music minister also said: “Mr. Asein’s determination in collaboration with scammers in the music industry to kill COSON, Nigeria’s biggest and best managed copyright collective management organization, a Nigerian institution hitherto a source of pride to the country, respected across the globe, cannot be allowed to continue. His manipulation of the system to deny the well over 5000 members of COSON our rights and the proceeds of our labour as enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution must stop. His many gimmicks to impoverish and deny legitimate income to the members of COSON, our many staff, their families and dependents at a time of severe economic hardship while he is feeding fat on government money, is wickedness of the worst kind.
When Uche Emeka Paul’s motion came up for debate at the AGM at which COSON members approved a board proposal for the sum of N208,500,000.00 (Two Hundred Million, Five Hundred Thousand Naira) to be distributed to the members of the society as royalties, not even one member dissented.
