Written evidence from Neville Harms
SUMMARY:
- BBC broadcasts in Swahili and Kinyarwanda/Kirundi
to East and Central Africa are among the jewels in the crown of
World Service output
- The size of the audience in Swahili - at least
16 million - is an indication of the degree to which it is valued
in the wide and often volatile target area
- Despite the growth of FM reception via BBC relays
and partner stations, a good proportion of that audience still
receive the broadcasts on shortwave and will be lost if SW transmission
is ended.
- BBC FM relays and partner stations serving urban
areas can be subject to interference or closure by government
diktat or commercial failure, so SW back-up is crucial.
- The Great Lakes service in Kinyarwanda/Kirundi
is vital not only in Rwanda and Burundi but also for exile listeners
across eastern DRC who are beyond the range of FM stations, so
a loss of SW could be another disaster in a disaster-plagued region;
equally so, of course, for Swahili speakers in that area.
- If the tiny savings achieved by ending SW transmission
to East and Central Africa really cannot be found elsewhere,
it could surely be possible for DfID to take up the burden, as
they did for the Great Lakes service in the mid-1990s.
1. After a spell working in Zambia and fifteen years
making English language programmes for Africa, I was Head of the
BBC Swahili Service from 1988 until my retirement in 1996. In
that period, a time of considerable political turmoil and of huge
growth in the use of Swahili as a lingua franca in East and Central
Africa, our audience increased enormously. In Kenya and Tanzania
it rose from four or five per cent of adults to well over thirty
per cent, and substantial audiences were registered in northern
Mozambique, the north of Malawi and Zambia, and in Uganda. Less
formally, we knew we had many listeners in Rwanda and Burundi
and Eastern Zaire as it then was, now Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC). In response to the disastrous events in Rwanda in 1994
I launched the Great Lakes service in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi,
using funds I raised from a number of British NGOs and staffing
it with Rwandan and Burundian nationals already working in the
Swahili and French language services. Since then the operation
has grown and, after a period of funding by DfID, it is now an
established element of World Service output.
2. The huge audiences that were built up in the 1990s
through shortwave transmissions - principally from the Seychelles
Relay Station - have been reinforced and supplemented in recent
years by FM stations operated either by the BBC itself, as in
Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, for example, or by commercial broadcasters
who have contracted to incorporate BBC output into their own schedules.
While FM can give much better reception, it has inherent difficulties
and risks:
(a) It is short-range and can therefore only
serve urban areas and their immediate surroundings with a satisfactory
signal; the loss of shortwave, therefore, will deny many rural
listeners any reception. Vast areas of northern Kenya would have
no signal, and in Tanzania BBC audience researchers reckon most
of the south in particular would be cut off, even though the BBC's
main partner claims to have universal coverage through its network
of FM relays. Listening to BBC Swahili would also be impossible
in Mozambique, Malawi. Zambia and, most importantly, in a great
deal of DRC. It is estimated that in total some six million listeners
would be lost.
(b) Rebroadcasting by privately-owned partner
stations can be vulnerable to interference or closure by governments
taking offence at the content of BBC programmes or can lead to
unwarranted self-censorship by programme makers anxious not to
be denied their platform. Privately-owned stations can also, of
course, go silent - temporarily or permanently - for reasons of
inefficiency or commercial failure.
(c) In countries where the BBC is allowed to
have its own FM relays - Tanzania is not one of them - some of
the above problems are obviated, but even here there is serious
risk from official displeasure. The Rwandan government demonstrated
not too long ago that it can close a BBC station down if it doesn't
like what is being said. It would not be surprising if the same
thing were to happen in Kenya, Uganda or DRC.
3. While I was still in charge of the Swahili service
I resisted for these very reasons calls for any headlong rush
to reliance on rebroadcasting. I believe that, to a large degree,
those considerations still apply today and that it will be a serious
mistake to give up transmission by shortwave. If a service is
worth providing, it surely must be provided reliably. And while
there is undoubtedly some growth in accessing the output through
the new digital technology - computers, iphones etc - it will
be many years before these become a viable alternative for the
mass of people in the region.
4. The Great Lakes service in Kinyarwanda/Kirundi
continues to be a vital source of reliable news and useful information
in a region that has been plagued for years by distortion and
misinformation from the local media, government-run or private.
Operating in a language universally understood in Rwanda and Burundi,
it can cover local events in much more detail than is possible
in BBC output in English, French or Swahili. But the service is
not only important inside Rwanda and Burundi, where - provided
government does not, as last year, become hostile - it is heard
on good quality FM; it is also desperately needed across the border
in eastern DRC, where there are large numbers of Kinyarwanda and
Kirundi speakers, both long term residents and people who, for
good reasons or bad, have become exiles from their own country
in more recent years. There are a number of FM relays in DRC but,
because of the continuing unrest, many of these people are constantly
on the move and frequently go out of range of the FM stations;
they need a shortwave alternative to fall back on. In any case,
there are listeners well to the north of Goma, close to the border
with Uganda and inside Uganda itself, who have never had access
to the Great Lakes service in FM and who would be lost entirely
by the closure of its transmission on shortwave.
5. I have not been able to get a precise figure but
I am told that the savings achieved by closing down the shortwave
transmission of the Swahili and Great Lakes services represent
a tiny proportion of the total that the World Service has been
required to cut. It would be surprising if the one or two hundred
thousand pounds required could not be found elsewhere. But if
that is really not possible, there is an alternative. In the latter
part of the 1990s DfID was happy to take over the funding of the
Great Lakes service when the NGOs who enabled it to be launched
withdrew. They continued to provide the resources until the operation
was incorporated into regular grant-in-aid funded World Service
output. Surely it would be possible for DfID to take on a similar
role in maintaining the shortwave distribution of these vital
services to countries that are already significant recipients
of British aid. It could fit perfectly well into DfID's remit
and could be regarded as an extremely good use of a very small
bit of the department's ring-fenced resources.
11 February 2011
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