Radio Days Africa: why radio is still key in communications for rights and governance in Africa

Lazaro Bamo stood up in front of an attentive crowd at Radio Days Africa last Thursday to talk about his newly funded project, Face2Face.

He told the group that two months ago he pitched his project idea several times to a room full of people, all competing for funding during an intensive Global Innovation Competition week in Jakarta. On the last day of the competition, Bamo sweated through the final pitch in front of cameras (and a couple of hundred people) at a formal function up on stage until finally, along with four other projects, Face2Face won gold, meaning the project was considered innovative enough to be funded byMaking All Voices Count.

So, he said, speaking at Radio Days Africa would be much easier than that. The crowd laughed – we’re all communicators, but we’ve all been nervous presenters too.

Face2Face’s Lazaro Bamo with Nooshin Erfani-Ghadimi from the Wits Justice Project

Radio Days Africa

Bamo was part of a panel at Radio Days Africa that showed the strength of African innovation and the demand for community radio.

Radio Days Africa is the largest meeting of radio innovators and talent on the continent.  It is based at the University of the Witwatersrand and is run by Wits Radio Academy’s Franz Kruger. The conference this year saw a larger focus on Africa than previous years (this was the 6^th year of the conference) and it gathered speakers from across the continent, including Zambia, Nigeria and Mozambique, to talk about the importance of radio.

Who says radio isn’t innovative?

Only people who aren’t listening and learning. In 2015 there were five gold winners at the Global Innovation Competition, and two of these winners were involved with community radio – which says a lot about the critical role radio plays in Africa, not just in rural areas, but as an established voice in the lives and homes of most people in the continent.

Nooshin Erfani-Ghadimi, Project Coordinator of Wits Justice Project, introduced the panel and said that these two projects winning in Jakarta showed how important the medium was on the continent, despite the rise of the internet and social media. Both winning projects were on the panel.

 

• Face2Face: The first was Bamo’s Face2Face initiative which aims to track the experiences of people using Mozambique’s new Right to Information Law to obtain public information. Documenting their experiences and partnering with community radio, the project will highlight and challenge the barriers that still remain in getting information that is now legally supposed to be in the public domain.

 

• The Citizen Justice Network: The second project was The Citizen Justice Network. Paul McNally created the Citizen Justice Network (CJN) with Wits Justice Project and Wits Radio Academy and discussed how the concept went from a discussion, to a proposal, through the Making All Voices Count mentoring programme, to being implemented. The CJN will train junior paralegals at community advice offices to be journalists and help them produce radio stories on legal issues for their local community radio station. In this way, the CJN will operate as a bridge between those with the information around justice in a community and those who desperately need it, allowing Wits Justice Project in Johannesburg to identify patterns of miscarriages of justice across the country and implement this information in their ongoing advocacy. It will also – of great interest to the folk at Radio Days – promote quality and unbiased radio documentary and give producers the chance to distribute their content across the country and on-line.

So what’s next?

Bamo and McNally fielded questions from the audience and gave their thanks. They are both about to start their pilot projects with hope to scale them up, grow the funding and give a voice to the people in their respective areas. The two promise to meet in Mozambique next time (Bamo’s home turf) and collaborate further, but know they are supported by a vibrant and still-growing radio community who are challenging assumptions about governance and rights all across Africa.

Bram Fischer’s spirit lives on at Wits

“The spirit of Bram Fischer is still alive at Wits….Yesterday, Joel Joffe and I were privileged to meet the members from Wits Justice Project and the Law Council Student Body who have done fantastic work…”

These were the words of Sir Nicholas Stadlen, a former British High Court Judge, who led the 17-member panel discussion at the Bram Fischer colloquium hosted by Wits University, on 26 March 2015. The Wits Law School honoured Fisher with an honorary doctorate of laws on the same day.

(Listen to his full speech here.)

A day before the colloquium, the Wits Justice Project team had an opportunity to meet Sir Nicholas Stadlen and the founder of the Joffe Charitable Trust – Lord Joel Joffe – which helps fund the Project. Lord Joffe was also part of the legal team which defended the Rivonia trialists, along with Bram Fischer and George Bizos.

Wits played an important role in the history of the struggle against apartheid and injustice. Many leaders of the struggle and the lawyers who acted for them studied and formed lifelong friendship there. These include Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, George Bizos and Joel Joffe.

Sir Nicholas Stadlen, Lord Joel Joffe, Prof Anton Harber with some of the members of the Wits Justice Project team.

The Bram Fischer Colloquium

This year marks 50 years since Abram (Bram) Fisher was arrested in 1965. In 1963 and 1964, he had been the defence advocate of the accused in the Rivonia trial. He was arrested in 1966 for his own political activities against the apartheid government and later died in 1975 still a prisoner of the apartheid state. Fischer was hailed as a “warm, kind and generous man who inspired love and admiration even among those who did not share his political beliefs”. At the time he was serving a life sentence for furthering the aims of communism and conspiracy to overthrow the apartheid government.

The Wits Colloquium panel included, among others, Mandela’s co-accused Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni and Denis Goldberg, as well as their lawyers George Bizos and Lord Joel Joffe, and Fischer’s daughters, Ilse Wilson and Ruth Rice.

Panellist of Bram Fischer colloquium hosted at Wits. Photo by Wits University

Giving a speech at the honorary graduation ceremony in the afternoon, Lord Joffe paid tribute to his former co-council in the Rivonia Trial defence team, saying one of the many things he had learned from Fischer, “is that law is about justice, which appears often to be overlooked by some lawyers in running their practices. Inherent in the honourable profession of law, should surely be a commitment to justice, and to use the law to achieve justice, both for those who can afford to pay, and for those who cannot”.

 

Related readings:

‘I did what was Right’ Statement from the dock by Bram Fischer after the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial in 1966.

A message from underground, By Bram Fischer

Who was Abram ‘Bram’ Fischer,

Biography of Bram Fischer

A brilliant legal mind, March 26

The law is about justice, March 26

Wits Justice Project scores a hat-trick

For the third year in a row, the Wits Justice Project has been awarded the prestigious Webber Wentzel Legal Journalist of the Year Award.

This year, our journalist, Paul McNally won in the radio broadcast category for his story, ‘Drug withdrawal in remand detention’ which aired on community radio station, Thetha FM.

The judges noted the piece was “a dramatic example of what can be achieved via collaboration between a community radio station and an established institution.” Read more of the judges’ comments here, and listen to the podcast here.

WJP partners with Thetha FM, a small station making a big impact

 

The generator which powers Orange Farm community radio station Thetha FM (Photo: Paul McNally)

Thetha FM serves a massive 360 000 listeners a week – from inside a high school with no electricity, writes Paul McNally of the Wits Justice Project. The WJP is partnering with the station on a new half-hour show to educate listeners about their rights.

Thetha FM’s logo (Photo: thethafm.co.za )

A brutal sound rattles across the school yard. I’m told there’s no electricity at Isikhumbuzo Secondary School – these kids are given lessons by sunlight – and so Thetha FM, the radio station based on the school grounds in Orange Farm, is powered by a one-metre-square petrol generator. It’s parked right under the cluster of satellite dishes that give the station its huge reach – from Orange Farm in Gauteng all the way to the Free State – and makes it the 4^th largest community radio station in the country.

In Programming Manager Mochacho’s office – too small to be a converted classroom – there’s a crude graph drawn on a piece of paper with a permanent marker that shows the listener figures of the station, escalating to the current 360 000 a week. That’s more than half of the people that tune in to 702.

Thetha FM has grown in popularity. (Photo: Paul McNally)

When I hear about the shows Thetha FM airs I feel cheated that I’ve been stuck listening to suburban 702. At 1pm on a Saturday for three straight hours they run a prison “current affairs” show. They phone prisoners inside, get the latest gossip, talk about life with the warders and give practical rehabilitation advice.

As proof of the prisoners’ loyalty to Thetha, in January this year when a riot broke out at Groenpunt Prison in Deneysville in the northern Free State, prisoners called out to a radio station to give their demands. After cells were burnt and barricades erected they wanted a friendly, understanding voice to hear their complaints of poor service delivery. There was only one choice – they called Thetha FM on cellphones, allegedly smuggled in by guards.

A member of the Thetha FM team (Photo: Paul McNally)

When the story broke Mochacho cancelled all their planned programming and kept the riot story going live until 2am. As a result of the story a representative from the Department of Correctional Services now visits the station once a week. Thetha’s relationship with prisoners is so strong that the quickest way for the authorities to communicate with the prisoners is to go through the station.

The exhaustive phone-ins have given the station a solid grip on what their listeners need, better than any Twitter feed or focus group. However, Thetha only has one phone line and you have to call them, because they have no money to pay the phone bill.

The satellite dishes which enable the station to reach hundreds of thousands of listeners (Photo: Paul McNally)

This idea of a prison show was actually written on my notepad as something for the Wits Justice Project to initiate, but it sounds like they’ve got it covered. This is when my humbling starts. I have come from The City, I’m sure you’ve heard of it: Johannesburg. It’s a modern African city, don’t you know? This was my attitude walking in; I couldn’t help it. But after Mochacho starts listing – over the heavy sound of the generator – his other programming and the capacity this tiny studio has for translation and production I know we’ll be equal partners. This isn’t a rescue mission but a collaboration.

That is not to say there is no space for new programming. The Wits Justice Project is starting a 30 minute show with Thetha FM called “Question Your Rights” which will use legal experts to answer some of the very important, justice-based questions for the people of this community. We’ll spend one show on how bail works, for example. We’ll cover it in detail and in an African language.

Mochacho tells me the community has a problem with “mob justice” and this largely comes from people misunderstanding bail. They see a guy arrested and then released the next day and believe a deal has been struck with the cops – some kind of bribery has transpired – and so they try to administer a punishment themselves. A violent one, says Mochacho. By providing a show on the nuts and bolts of bail we could contribute to reducing vigilantism.

I drive around Orange Farm afterwards – thinking I’m a kasi local now, having been out here twice. I promptly get lost in the hilly network of dusty back roads and am quite panicked (though I don’t tell anyone this). I finally call Bricks Mokolo, at the community paralegal advice office, to come and find me. Bricks points at his truck and tells me this is what you need if you’re going to drive off the tar roads. I nod. “Lawyers have low, fancy cars. They are no good for around here,” he says.

The first edition of The Wits Justice Radio Show will be broadcast on Tuesday the 30th of April at 13:30 till 14:00 on Thetha FM (frequency 100.6).

Wits Justice Project video: community paralegals in Orange Farm

Community paralegals at work (Photo: Timap for Justice)

Watch Paul McNally’s video on community paralegals, made after the Wits Justice Project’s recent breakfast discussion on community paralegals in South Africa.

McNally interviews Bricks Mokolo of the Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Centre about the centre’s work, funding challenges and a recycling initiative to raise money for the centre.

WJP coordinator Nooshin Erfani-Ghadimi also features in the video, arguing that community paralegals can relieve some of the pressure on SA’s criminal justice system and make it more effective.

Watch the video.

Related resources:

Outcome report: Justice for Breakfast discussion on community paralegals in SA 

Bringing the law to the people: The role of community paralegals in our country by WJP legal intern Thandeka Khati 

Community paralegals may improve access to  Justice in SA by WJP journalism intern Hazel Meda (published in the Saturday Star)