Back and Next - Back and NextA defining moment for GRTS
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
‘There is no challenge more challenging than the challenge to improve you.’ -- Michael F. Staley
At a time when Gambians in Europe and elsewhere have been writing over the years, expressing the need for the national broadcaster to be connected to the world satellite grid, the latest project embarked upon by the Department of State for Communications, Information and Information Technology, and by extension President Jammeh, is a clear manifestation that GRTS has taken a new direction.
Not only will it put The Gambia on a firm footing in terms of exposure and international recognition, being on satellite TV can spur economic growth through employment and investment. Indeed, The Gambia is one of few countries in Africa with relative peace and political stability; so the power of the TV will further propagate the message that the country is a good one to do business in.
When one looks at what is currently happening in this so-called information age, the facts are glaringly in the air; the world has ever since been divided , which is to say that these power blocs have succeeded to sway the media in their ways. CNN, BBC, CBC etc are synonymous with western ideologies or conceptions, while Al Jazeera is more or less an embodiment of the Arab world, with particular interest on how events are shaping up in the Middle East.
Not long ago, readers of the London based New African magazine expressed in no uncertain terms that it was time Africa had a TV station that would carry the views of the continent and address it to her people taking the human interest angle. A lot of people especially the downtrodden in Africa would hesitate to speak to a TV crew from the West; this is because they don’t want to be misrepresented or portrayed in a negative light. How many times do we watch TV from abroad, and what do we see? Africa is being portrayed as a God-forsaken continent, hopeless, a people living in penury.
We have seen over the years how the dominant news channels in Europe or the United States have attempted to re-colonise our minds to the extent that some of us have adopted a maxim: ‘If they say so then it must be true’. We have become accustomed to their ideologies; it seems we are thinking like them which is why success stories or discoveries in Africa are often dismissed as another piece of propaganda from the powers that be. When will all this change?
The likes of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nyerere and others in the 1960s felt that what was happening on the continent was unacceptable. Not only did they fight against imperialism and neo-colonialism, but the past African freedom fighters wanted us to have a respectable voice in the world. Even though at that time, due to a number of factors, Africa was not yet ready to have satellite TVs, the point was that there were indications that in the future the first world will beam their satellites on the colonies and tell them what they (colonisers) want their subjects to hear and see. Just look at what is happening in Harare; because President Mugabe did not give them licence to report on events in his country, Uncle Sam and his production crew would enter Harare and report clandestinely.
Why Harare, when there are so many stories else where on the continent? No wonder some philosophers believe that one of the most effective means of communication is television; because when watching a TV programme the mind tends to concentrate and try to come to terms with what is happening, especially during political scandals, breaking news on bomb blast, etc. Perhaps this is why there is so much hype in the media circles about timing and scheduling of programmes so that certain programmes are intended for certain audiences.
Established in December 1995, GRTS TV is one of the youngest TV stations on the continent. However, like most public broadcasters, the national TV has grown in leaps and bounds. When the idea was first mooted by the Jammeh Administration, some thought it was not going to work. In short, some put it like this: ‘The Gambia was not ready for such ambitious projects’.
In the years that followed, the national broadcaster started proving the doubting Thomases wrong when it started participating in the International Children’s Day of Broadcasting (ICDB). In 2007, in the packed hall of the UNICEF house in New York, GRTS was declared winner of the West and Central African regional award for the ICDB. According to the UNICEF report, the seven nominees and regional winners were The Gambia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Germany, Kenya, Syria and Thailand. However, in the finals for the West and Central Africa category, The Gambia defeated Nigeria’s NTA. Not only did the awards bring respite to the teeming mass of children who participated in the programme, but it served as moral booster for the entire GRTS crew.
On the other hand, Radio Gambia, as it was then called, have been around since in the 1960s, being one of the oldest radio stations in the sub region, and like the TV, Radio Gambia has also witnessed some dramatic developments, especially during the advent of the July 22nd Revolution. The Radio news coverage and its current affairs programme stimulated a lot of interest; especially among the youthful population. Teachers would recommend their pupils to listen to the news on Radio Gambia to learn or improve their oral English language skills. When one looks at other programmes that focus on the history of the sub region, veteran historians such as AE Cham-Joof comes to mind.
Historians undoubtedly benefited a lot from the oral account of the country’s chequered history. The good news is that Radio Gambia’s library is replete with good materials which when presented on air will bring back memories of the good old days. While Radio Gambia received positive ratings in the city, due to the fact that it existed virtually in the urban areas, the villages were hardly in touch with events in the city. With time this notion of ‘Radio Kombo’ was completely phased out when rural communities began to realize that not only were they getting signals from the national radio but they had been presented with a forum to express their views mainly on the development challenges they were confronted with.
I remember, in 1992 one of my late grandfathers cultivated a groundnut farm near Radio Gambia. As a child I had listened to news from the national broadcaster, little did I know that one day I was going to fetch water and rob shoulders with the likes of Sarjo Barrow, Alh. Modou Sanyang, (DG) (and the late Musa Camara) at the Radio Gambia’s tap.
Capital expenditure vs economic gains
The Gambia Radio & Television Services stands to benefit a lot if it is on satellite, but the fact of the matter is that being on satellite TV is one of the most ambitious and costly ventures anyone can imagine. Aside from the technical know-how, not to talk about the capital expenditure, satellite, by and large, is a big man’s project.
Who says GRTS cannot withstand the heat? More than anything else, I am an optimist; therefore I believe that with support from the president, His Excellency Professor Jammeh, this latest project embarked upon by the national broadcaster will go ahead as planned. Talking about challenges, the writer Margaret Chase Smith said when people keep telling you that you can't do a thing; you kind of like to try it. And George S Patton puts it in this light: ‘ Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.’
The satellite revolution is still new to Africa. Russia is the first country in the world to launch a satellite in space in 1957 and the first satellite television signal was relayed from Europe to the Telstar satellite over North America in 1962. Of all the regions on the African continent, it seems Southern and Eastern zones are doing pretty well with their investment on satellite TV. Writing for Africa Investor.Com, Sarah Rundell painted a vivid picture of the current state of affairs of the satellite revolution in that region. ‘While explosive growth in mobile phone use is providing plenty of enticing content opportunities, investors are not ignoring Africa ’s traditional media and distribution channels, which in many cases remain underdeveloped, in favour of new technology.
Money is also going into print, television and radio, and foreign and African companies are scaling up their presence on the continent.’ We have seen over the years the positive impact peace and political stability create in a country, and how such developments boosted advertisement for the media. A case in point is Kenya. “Africa’s media market is young, and the opportunity for making money is enormous," says Wilfred Kiboro, former CEO of Kenya’s media giant, The Nation Media Group, the biggest media company in east and central Africa, adding “The liberalisation of markets and the democratic process is heralding an era of change: developing Africa’s media also has the capacity to make a huge difference."
It is hoped that in The Gambia, the satellite TV would enable us to market the country and the same time generate the much needed revenue for the TV; after all there is hardly anyway a TV can sustain itself without ads. Over the years, the Department of State for Tourism spent a lot of money through CNN, advertising The Gambia as a tourism heaven; the marketing trick was that such ads were intended for the world audience. Being one of the largest of all UK broadcasters, BBC’s expenditure as of 2007 was 4.3 billion pounds. Well, suffice it to say that the principal means of funding the BBC is through licence, costing 139.50 pounds per year, per household (as of May 2008) according to wikipedia.`
When compared to the BBC, CNN have more viewers than many news channels monitored in Africa, as of June 2008. CNN is available in over 93 million US households, seen by viewers in 212 countries.
What about Africa?
TV penetration even among African countries is poor. The Africa Media Development Initiative (AMDI) recently published a report on the media in 17 sub-Saharan countries supervised by the BBC World Service Trust. It found out that TV ownership ranged from 2% in the DRC and Somalia, to 76% in Mozambique. Some people estimate that the number of people owing TV in Africa has grown 300% between 1995 and 2005. The AMDI also found the number of commercial stations has increased over the last five years. Kenya now has five national commercial stations, more than any other country surveyed, and in Nigeria the number of regional commercial channels has grown from 10 to 14.
The Gambia Television will undoubtedly get its own share from the market when it comes to ads, especially if one looks at the number of financial companies that are looking for office space in the country. Not only that, the peace, political stability and above all the genuine Gambian smiles may be one of the factors that will lure people to tune into The Gambia satellite TV.
www.ebrimagambia.blogspot.com
At a time when Gambians in Europe and elsewhere have been writing over the years, expressing the need for the national broadcaster to be connected to the world satellite grid, the latest project embarked upon by the Department of State for Communications, Information and Information Technology, and by extension President Jammeh, is a clear manifestation that GRTS has taken a new direction.
Not only will it put The Gambia on a firm footing in terms of exposure and international recognition, being on satellite TV can spur economic growth through employment and investment. Indeed, The Gambia is one of few countries in Africa with relative peace and political stability; so the power of the TV will further propagate the message that the country is a good one to do business in.
When one looks at what is currently happening in this so-called information age, the facts are glaringly in the air; the world has ever since been divided , which is to say that these power blocs have succeeded to sway the media in their ways. CNN, BBC, CBC etc are synonymous with western ideologies or conceptions, while Al Jazeera is more or less an embodiment of the Arab world, with particular interest on how events are shaping up in the Middle East.
Not long ago, readers of the London based New African magazine expressed in no uncertain terms that it was time Africa had a TV station that would carry the views of the continent and address it to her people taking the human interest angle. A lot of people especially the downtrodden in Africa would hesitate to speak to a TV crew from the West; this is because they don’t want to be misrepresented or portrayed in a negative light. How many times do we watch TV from abroad, and what do we see? Africa is being portrayed as a God-forsaken continent, hopeless, a people living in penury.
We have seen over the years how the dominant news channels in Europe or the United States have attempted to re-colonise our minds to the extent that some of us have adopted a maxim: ‘If they say so then it must be true’. We have become accustomed to their ideologies; it seems we are thinking like them which is why success stories or discoveries in Africa are often dismissed as another piece of propaganda from the powers that be. When will all this change?
The likes of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nyerere and others in the 1960s felt that what was happening on the continent was unacceptable. Not only did they fight against imperialism and neo-colonialism, but the past African freedom fighters wanted us to have a respectable voice in the world. Even though at that time, due to a number of factors, Africa was not yet ready to have satellite TVs, the point was that there were indications that in the future the first world will beam their satellites on the colonies and tell them what they (colonisers) want their subjects to hear and see. Just look at what is happening in Harare; because President Mugabe did not give them licence to report on events in his country, Uncle Sam and his production crew would enter Harare and report clandestinely.
Why Harare, when there are so many stories else where on the continent? No wonder some philosophers believe that one of the most effective means of communication is television; because when watching a TV programme the mind tends to concentrate and try to come to terms with what is happening, especially during political scandals, breaking news on bomb blast, etc. Perhaps this is why there is so much hype in the media circles about timing and scheduling of programmes so that certain programmes are intended for certain audiences.
Established in December 1995, GRTS TV is one of the youngest TV stations on the continent. However, like most public broadcasters, the national TV has grown in leaps and bounds. When the idea was first mooted by the Jammeh Administration, some thought it was not going to work. In short, some put it like this: ‘The Gambia was not ready for such ambitious projects’.
In the years that followed, the national broadcaster started proving the doubting Thomases wrong when it started participating in the International Children’s Day of Broadcasting (ICDB). In 2007, in the packed hall of the UNICEF house in New York, GRTS was declared winner of the West and Central African regional award for the ICDB. According to the UNICEF report, the seven nominees and regional winners were The Gambia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Germany, Kenya, Syria and Thailand. However, in the finals for the West and Central Africa category, The Gambia defeated Nigeria’s NTA. Not only did the awards bring respite to the teeming mass of children who participated in the programme, but it served as moral booster for the entire GRTS crew.
On the other hand, Radio Gambia, as it was then called, have been around since in the 1960s, being one of the oldest radio stations in the sub region, and like the TV, Radio Gambia has also witnessed some dramatic developments, especially during the advent of the July 22nd Revolution. The Radio news coverage and its current affairs programme stimulated a lot of interest; especially among the youthful population. Teachers would recommend their pupils to listen to the news on Radio Gambia to learn or improve their oral English language skills. When one looks at other programmes that focus on the history of the sub region, veteran historians such as AE Cham-Joof comes to mind.
Historians undoubtedly benefited a lot from the oral account of the country’s chequered history. The good news is that Radio Gambia’s library is replete with good materials which when presented on air will bring back memories of the good old days. While Radio Gambia received positive ratings in the city, due to the fact that it existed virtually in the urban areas, the villages were hardly in touch with events in the city. With time this notion of ‘Radio Kombo’ was completely phased out when rural communities began to realize that not only were they getting signals from the national radio but they had been presented with a forum to express their views mainly on the development challenges they were confronted with.
I remember, in 1992 one of my late grandfathers cultivated a groundnut farm near Radio Gambia. As a child I had listened to news from the national broadcaster, little did I know that one day I was going to fetch water and rob shoulders with the likes of Sarjo Barrow, Alh. Modou Sanyang, (DG) (and the late Musa Camara) at the Radio Gambia’s tap.
Capital expenditure vs economic gains
The Gambia Radio & Television Services stands to benefit a lot if it is on satellite, but the fact of the matter is that being on satellite TV is one of the most ambitious and costly ventures anyone can imagine. Aside from the technical know-how, not to talk about the capital expenditure, satellite, by and large, is a big man’s project.
Who says GRTS cannot withstand the heat? More than anything else, I am an optimist; therefore I believe that with support from the president, His Excellency Professor Jammeh, this latest project embarked upon by the national broadcaster will go ahead as planned. Talking about challenges, the writer Margaret Chase Smith said when people keep telling you that you can't do a thing; you kind of like to try it. And George S Patton puts it in this light: ‘ Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.’
The satellite revolution is still new to Africa. Russia is the first country in the world to launch a satellite in space in 1957 and the first satellite television signal was relayed from Europe to the Telstar satellite over North America in 1962. Of all the regions on the African continent, it seems Southern and Eastern zones are doing pretty well with their investment on satellite TV. Writing for Africa Investor.Com, Sarah Rundell painted a vivid picture of the current state of affairs of the satellite revolution in that region. ‘While explosive growth in mobile phone use is providing plenty of enticing content opportunities, investors are not ignoring Africa ’s traditional media and distribution channels, which in many cases remain underdeveloped, in favour of new technology.
Money is also going into print, television and radio, and foreign and African companies are scaling up their presence on the continent.’ We have seen over the years the positive impact peace and political stability create in a country, and how such developments boosted advertisement for the media. A case in point is Kenya. “Africa’s media market is young, and the opportunity for making money is enormous," says Wilfred Kiboro, former CEO of Kenya’s media giant, The Nation Media Group, the biggest media company in east and central Africa, adding “The liberalisation of markets and the democratic process is heralding an era of change: developing Africa’s media also has the capacity to make a huge difference."
It is hoped that in The Gambia, the satellite TV would enable us to market the country and the same time generate the much needed revenue for the TV; after all there is hardly anyway a TV can sustain itself without ads. Over the years, the Department of State for Tourism spent a lot of money through CNN, advertising The Gambia as a tourism heaven; the marketing trick was that such ads were intended for the world audience. Being one of the largest of all UK broadcasters, BBC’s expenditure as of 2007 was 4.3 billion pounds. Well, suffice it to say that the principal means of funding the BBC is through licence, costing 139.50 pounds per year, per household (as of May 2008) according to wikipedia.`
When compared to the BBC, CNN have more viewers than many news channels monitored in Africa, as of June 2008. CNN is available in over 93 million US households, seen by viewers in 212 countries.
What about Africa?
TV penetration even among African countries is poor. The Africa Media Development Initiative (AMDI) recently published a report on the media in 17 sub-Saharan countries supervised by the BBC World Service Trust. It found out that TV ownership ranged from 2% in the DRC and Somalia, to 76% in Mozambique. Some people estimate that the number of people owing TV in Africa has grown 300% between 1995 and 2005. The AMDI also found the number of commercial stations has increased over the last five years. Kenya now has five national commercial stations, more than any other country surveyed, and in Nigeria the number of regional commercial channels has grown from 10 to 14.
The Gambia Television will undoubtedly get its own share from the market when it comes to ads, especially if one looks at the number of financial companies that are looking for office space in the country. Not only that, the peace, political stability and above all the genuine Gambian smiles may be one of the factors that will lure people to tune into The Gambia satellite TV.
www.ebrimagambia.blogspot.com
Author: Ebrima Baldeh, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi.
See Also - See Also