Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault
pro–opening up. [. . .] And there was also the question of training. Because most of the journalists at that time were print journalists. [. . .] Here, [the liberalization] was a donation from the government.11
Radio was not the realm of journalists. From the authorities’ point of view, the first stations were owned by “trustworthy” people who they knew supported the establishment, like Thomas Katto. He was a senior businessman who owned Radio Sanyu, the first private station to be launched, and who had made his fortune with a tissue factory and in clothing.12 Capital FM was launched next by William Pike, a British journalist at the time strongly supportive of the Movement; and Patrick Quarcoo, a Ghanaian businessman and radio presenter. At the time, Quarcoo was in his thirties. Today he owns several stations in Uganda and Kenya, as well as a tabloid in Nairobi. He left Ghana in 1984 to secure an MBA in Manchester. He specialized in media management and was later hired by Reuters as a business manager for Africa, which is how he met Pike. The Ugandan economic context seemed favorable to him as a media product developer:
We were looking for a country that was liberal enough and at that time, President Museveni was also looking for investors to go into the country. There was a fortuitous mix. [. . .] At that time, some advertisers would look to advertise on national radio and national television and they would be told there’s no space, you have to wait for two or three days. So it was a real business opportunity to be able to come in and say to people, “Hey, if they won’t take the money, we’ll give you advertising.”13
Maria Kiwanuka, already mentioned above as a friend of the historicals of Club Obbligato’s Ekimeeza, is a good example of this first generation of radio owners, and of the overlapping nature of the private and public sectors that has proved instrumental in the development of these new venues for political speech. In September 1997, she launched Radio One (followed four years later by a sister station, Radio Two Akaboozi, which broadcasts in Luganda). She comes from an influential Ganda family. Her father was a civil servant. She was born in the 1950s and educated in Kampala, graduating with a degree in commerce from Makerere in 1977. She worked in the banking sector before going to London for her MBA . She was then recruited by the World Bank as an analyst.14 When she came back to Uganda in the 1990s, she became a board member of the Uganda Development Bank, a nonexecutive director of Stanbic Bank, and a member of the Presidential Economic Commission.15 Her husband, Mohan Kiwanuka, heads Oscar Industries, a company created in the 1970s that specializes in stationery, and he is regularly cited in the press as one of the wealthiest men in the country.16 In 2011, her links with the political establishment were publicly acknowledged when Maria Kiwanuka was nominated as minister of finance, a position she held until March 2015.17
From the mid-1990s, stations started broadcasting in the vernacular. For instance, Radio Simba was launched in 1996 by Aga Sekalala Jr., a Ganda businessman from one of the wealthiest families of Uganda, who made his fortune in real estate, nightclubs, agriculture, and poultry.18 He told me that he was a specialist in “entertainment for the masses,” and he saw radio as strongly articulated to his clubbing business.19 However, whereas Pike, Quarcoo, and Katto hired DJs and broadcast European and US music, Simba’s managers had a more local anchorage. They hired comedians and humorists from the dense Kampala Luganda-speaking theater scene. Again, the radio landscape was moving away from journalism, its sociability circles, and its intellectual traditions. The year 1996 also saw the creation of CBS, the radio of the Kingdom of Buganda, as well as Voice of Toro, located in Fort Portal in Western Uganda, which was the first private radio station to be based up-country. Before that, all private stations were broadcasting in a 150-kilometer radius around the capital city. Apart from CBS, whose founders had a more immediate political objective in mind (see chapter 4), these new radio stations were also launched with strictly business objectives. The programs were focused on music and entertainment.
The Difficult Politicization of the Airwaves
In 2000, the private newspaper the Monitor launched its own radio station, Monitor FM. This was the first important investment in broadcast media by intellectuals and professional journalists. The programs were very different from the other stations’, as they were largely dominated by political debate: according to one of its journalists, “We had that Monitor content: ‘seriousness, seriousness.’ [. . .] Our format was radio talk format, from morning to evening: talk, talk, talk.”20 Economically it would prove to be a disastrous operation: after a few months, the station had to be relaunched due to bad audience figures. For most media workers, the failure of Monitor FM clearly demonstrated that if they wanted to talk politics on-air, they would have to respect certain conventions in order to be sustainable. As one said, “The failure of Monitor FM to pick up at the start killed all our hopes that professionals [journalists] can run an FM station better. [. . .] Radio made more money playing music and cracking jokes, something DJs did better.”21
This experience raises the question of how many people actually listen to political radio talk shows. Audience research carried out by private companies commissioned by the stations does not give exact figures, only tendencies. However, they clearly show that politics is not what attracts the most listeners.22 Today, as in the 2000s, most stations mainly broadcast entertainment and music, with only a couple of hours a day dedicated to politics. When looking at national figures (mixing Kampala and the rest of the country), evening political shows have very low audiences, except for CBS’s program Kiriza oba gana (Take it or leave it, in Luganda), long hosted by Meddie Nsereko (see chapter 4). However, even in the case of CBS, audience figures always rose after the programs finished. Regarding weekends, even if these shows were not the most popular, there were rises in audience levels for CBS and Radio Simba for their ebimeeza (both in Luganda). But this was not the case for Radio One’s English-speaking Ekimeeza. Figures restricted to Kampala gave a different picture. English-speaking evening shows saw a slight rise, illustrating how they attracted mainly an urban audience. For Kampala only, Radio One’s Ekimeeza was more visible, although it was far from being the most popular show on the station in terms of quantitative listenership. In all cases, according to the available audience research, the radio stations scored their best audience figures with morning entertainment shows and music.
The decision to program political talk shows was not based on the belief that they would attract many listeners. Their existence depended on how much particular people within the station were keen on making them a brand product, and how much influence these people had on management decisions. Indeed, establishing repertoires of political critique in the media depended not only on negotiation between journalists and the authorities, but also on internal dynamics within the radio stations. Some radio owners were hostile to programming “politics,” not necessarily because this might have created conflicts with the state, but because it was not financially attractive.23
Many were indeed reluctant to program political talk shows.24 On Radio Sanyu, journalists from the newsroom were quite frustrated with this situation: “Most of the time, it was music. [. . .] And he [Katto, the owner] was so strict. He wanted the news [to be] no more than 5 minutes. . . . Usually we used to fight. . . . Whenever you could go like eight minutes, you could see the man come [into the studio].”25 As Radio Simba’s owner told me,
[People] were interested in a bit of politics, talk shows, but one of the things we realized was that there was no fun on radio. Radio was very dull. All the radios sounded like errr . . . RFI . . . boring . . . BC. . . . Everybody believed that was what radio was supposed to be, very serious, and very unexciting and you know, nothing, no fun in radio. We decided we’re gonna be fun, lighthearted. [. . .] We set up a lot of entertainment programs, we got lots of funny guys, entertainment people, comedians on board, people who had been in drama, in theater, and we trained them on how to come on radio. [. . .] We had [only] two people from Mass Communication [department at Makerere University], and only one has remained here.26
At Capital FM, Pike started by hiring employees from the state broadcaster Radio Uganda; however, according to him, “It was very bad actually. After about three weeks we had to sack most of them.