When Francois Amani goes fishing, he always takes a radio — his sole source of companionship during long nights spent earning a living on the windy waters of Lake Kivu.
”It gets lonely out there,” says the 36-year-old fisherman. Aside from a need for company in his leaky dugout canoe, he revels in the thought that programs on Bukavu’s four private radio stations ”sometimes may raise the authorities’ blood pressure.”
It’s not surprising. In this corner of war-ravaged eastern Congo, where newspapers are hard to find, these are still radio days.
For Amani and the other 150 000 people of Bukavu, the four independent, low-wattage FM stations are an outlet where they get the latest news, share views and, increasingly, voice frustration with the Congolese Rally for Democracy, the Rwandan-backed rebels who run this decaying city in the heart of Africa.
The news and round-table discussions deal with the issues confronting ”the society we serve – poverty, insecurity, lack of development,” said Mushizi Kizito, who runs Radio Maendeleo.
The station, the oldest independent one in Bukavu, has been on the air since 1993, although it’s been shut down by the rebels a few times.
There are no figures on listenership or radio ownership in Bukavu. But in the markets, on the street, in houses and even on the fishing boats, residents are tuning in to the broadcasts in French, English and Kiswahili.
Rwandan troops have been in eastern Congo since the beginning of the war in 1998. Last month, as they were pulling out and thousands lined the streets to see them off, many huddled around radios, listening to news of other Rwandan withdrawals.
The rebels, however, have stayed, making conditions perilous for the radio stations. The rebels consider them irksome at best, and a threat at worst.
To stifle their growth and attract revenue to their own struggling and largely ignored radio station, they have banned the independents from carrying advertising.
Without advertising, Radio Maendeleo is largely funded by 11.11.11, a Belgian human rights advocacy group that focuses on media projects in developing countries. One of the other three stations is run by the UN mission in Congo, another by the Roman Catholic church and a third by a Protestant church.
Radio journalists are often detained by the rebels.
Kizito was detained for more than seven hours after Radio Maendeleo reported that Rwandan troops had re-entered Congo in violation of a recent peace accord.
The ”news programmes are often not favorable to the rebels,” Kizito said.
”We continue doing this job because we believe that we are serving a useful role.”
Rebel officials say the mere fact that stations are reporting news — and not the actual content of the reports — is the problem.
Their licenses confine them to ”evangelical or developmental matters,” said Jean-Pierre Lola Kisanga, a rebel representative. Bukavu, at the southern tip of Lake Kivu near the border with
Rwanda and Burundi, was once the region’s intellectual centre, with a teachers’ college built in the 1970s and then four universities. They attracted students and professors from around eastern Zaire, as it was known then, to the town of crumbling bungalows built by the Belgian colonists who ruled until 1960.
Bukavu’s latest rulers, the rebels, took the city in 1998, when Rwanda and Uganda sent in troops to support the ouster of the then president, Laurent Kabila.
Since then, the city has been declining steadily as rebels fail to provide social services and neglect schools and hospitals.
But radio is one sphere of life that has blossomed.
It ”opens the horizons,” says one listener, Bobos Nfundiko. A typical program is Radio Maendeleo’s weekly ”Peace and Development,” where studio guests and callers get to vent their frustrations.
On one recent show that drew rebel condemnation, Didas
Kaningini, a civic leader, commented that rebel troops have not been paid since the rebellion began in 1998 and that some of them have to rob townspeople to make a living.
The rebel army ”is not capable of guaranteeing peace in our country,” Kaningini said, and several callers agreed. – Sapa-AP