Today the Nats are, mostly, ANC.
The ANC Youth League is run by suits in their 30s who don’t like the president and would get a hernia if they tried to toyi toyi. The president does what parents the world over do with quirky adolescents; he’s pulled their allowance.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma wears a range in Taiwanese silk and extraordinary doeks tied so they look like antennae on her head and outdo anything Tannie Elize Botha (PW’s wife) inflicted on a TV-viewing public.
The SA Communist Party complains that the Scorpions should have phoned and made an appointment, instead of pitching up at 6am on the former deputy president’s stoep to raid his home.
In our land of charters, BEE, and endless talk about the rights of the previously disadvantaged, the newly advantaged – and the white honchos who welcomed them into the club of the obscenely privileged – pull in million-rand plus salary packages each month and retrench or rigidly impose hiring freezes, while 40 percent of the country looks for work and 57 percent live in poverty (Human Sciences Research Council, 2004).
The divorce rate is down, but that may be because fewer South Africans are marrying, although the trip down the aisle is popular with gays and evangelical Christians who abstain from sex before marriage.
So who are South Africans? And how does one design radio programming to suit them?
Pheladi Gwangwa, Talk Radio 702’s station manager, says: “If we talk about the Zuma-Cosatu-Mbeki saga we get calls, but if a water pipe bursts we get far more calls. When the governor of the Reserve Bank complained about parks in the city of Tshwane we were flooded with calls—” Not quite the response he gets when he delivers the latest statement on monetary policy.
Have we become more provincial? Yes and no. South Africans seem to be finally shaking off apartheid and the neat categories they were slotted into (white/black; Zulu/Xhosa, English/Afrikaans) and becoming a fascinating nation.
Neither colour, nor gender, nor sexual preference, nor income is a reliable barometer of who I am. And the most successful radio stations are paying attention. Kagiso Media’s head of research, Kim Heller, says: “The interesting aspect with Rams is that for the last few readings, if not the last few years, there has been an upward trend in private regional stations and we suspect that will be the trend moving forward. People are looking for a more customised product.”
The closer a station is to its market, the better it understands it. “The reason SABC is not doing very well is that they are still in the old paradigm of catering for different groups, like believing Zulus fit a certain type,” says Heller. “We focus on lifestyle rather than pure demographics, that is why radio stations like Jacaranda [Rams, past 7 days, 2,728-million for March to June 2005 compared to 2,394-million for March to May 2004 (see table overleaf)] with soft, relaxing music appeals to everyone. We have dj’s who talk to our listeners, not at them in the patronising way of SABC.”
Of course, SABC will deny the charge. At August’s presentation of the public broadcaster’s 2004/2005 annual report, chief operating officer Solly Mokoetle pointed out that listener loyalty on the PBS (public broadcasting service) radio brands is strong, with TSL (Time Spent Listening) up on most stations. “[Sotho-language station] Lesedi FM has the highest national rating,” he said, “with 23 hours and 20 minutes per listener, per week.” He also showed that Zulu-language giant Ukhozi FM is at 21 hours 11 minutes, with tshiVenda brand Phalaphala FM at 19 hours 35 minutes.
But Ukhozi, long the undisputed giant of South African radio in pure number terms, continues a downward trend – it has dipped by more than 300,000 listeners over the comparative period. Heller believes that in future it will find itself under threat to easy-listening stations like P4, which appeal to a young market.
In KwaZulu-Natal, Ukhozi’s heartland, P4 KZN has settled into a growth pattern, with listenership of 598,000 in March to June 2005, compared to 590,000 listeners in March to May last year. East Coast Radio is also up, from 1,793-million listeners to 2,089-million over the period.
So for Heller the trick for radio stations is to forget about “types” and start looking at the Oprah Winfrey solution. “[Oprah] directs herself at people who are trying to improve their lives,” she says. It makes sense; in South Africa greater opportunity has led to more aspirational citizens. Tell us how we can make more of the good we have and you interest all groups.
Thing is, to find where these aspirational South Africans are the media industry still uses the old categories – and here Cape Town’s LSM 6 to 10 coloured listeners, ages 25 to 49, fit the bill. The Rams breakdown [see pie chart overleaf] shows that P4 Cape Town dominates the segment at 27 percent market share, which is equal to the total of all community stations in the region. Primedia’s new acquisition Kfm is some way off at 20 percent, with SABC’s Good Hope FM a further two percent behind that. While the revenue chart out of Nielsen Media Research [see page—] tells a totally different story – currently, Kfm is far and away the biggest money-spinner of the three – things may well look different when the community’s younger generation moves up into this age demographic.
It’s something Charlene Deacon, Kaya FM’s managing director, understands only too well – her life epitomises the dream of the aspirational. When she arrived at Kaya from East Coast Radio, she was the ninth station manager in the then three-year life of the station (the station is now nine years old), and listenership was 603,000. A desperate board, she recalls with a chuckle, suggested she fire everyone. She didn’t, she inspired them. Revenue was then at R8-million, it’s now R45-million. “The bottom-line is firm,” says Deacon. “We’ve gone from losses to pretty good profit lines.” At present both Primedia and African Media Entertainment are vying to buy a stake in the station.
However, the latest Rams make Kaya’s listenership look rocky, with 1,17-million in March to May 2004 (past 7 days) and 985,000 for March to June this year. But Heller is the first to point out that the dips in Kaya and Yfm figures reflect Rams sampling changes, and not necessarily listenership losses.
Deacon, like Heller, is preoccupied with rediscovering the listener. She is currently targeting “Afropolitan” women. “She is a 35-year-old black professional woman,” says Deacon. “The reason we are targeting women is because they are less tolerant of rubbish and inane comments than men. If you target to that extreme you are more likely to maintain male listenership, but if you target male listenership then you alienate women.”
94.7 Highveld Stereo might be seen to buck that trend with Jeremy Mansfield’s Rude Awakening, but it has a strong witty woman in the form of Sam Cowan, countering the pub humour of Jeremy and his radio “mates”. Still, the sort of women who tune into Highveld are probably older, less educated and less successful than the women Deacon is targeting.
“[Kaya’s woman] is straddling a traditional world with culture, diversity and language, she’s trendy, and wants to know how to get the most out of her money,” Deacon explains. “She also wants to know how to care for her family better. A lot have parents who are much older and come from a completely different generation. Today’s listener asks questions like: ‘do I have to wear different clothing if I go to my husband’s mother’s house?’ It is a very interesting world that these women are trying to traverse.
“They want a friend on the radio that has the ability to talk sense to them about these things and isn’t too high-falutin’.”
But to get back to those old categories: in Gauteng it’s still Highveld that gets to where the lucrative listenership is. The Primedia cash cow dominates the region’s LSMs 6 to 10, ages 25 to 49, with 20 percent market share. That’s 7 percentage points ahead of two of the SABC’s huge stations – national commercial brand Metro FM and PBS brand Lesedi – and 13 points ahead of Kaya [see pie chart overleaf].
In the Free State and Eastern Cape there is only one private commercial station per region, Ofm and Radio Algoa respectively, and both are adult contemporary. Both are also doing relatively well on revenues and listeners – Ofm has added 115,000 listeners over the comparative Rams periods, and Radio Algoa is tracking steady.
Does that mean that adult contemporary, more so than aspirational or “lifestyle”, is the real category (read licence) to go after? Gwangwa, understandably, disagrees. She says 702’s listenership is growing. The latest Rams figures show a 3.2 percent improvement.
She suggests that it’s adult contemporary with a quintessential sameness of choice that makes doing your own programming on an MP3 more attractive than turning on the radio. But not everyone can afford an i-Pod; most turn on the radio, and when it is to 702, Gwangwa says they will hear “local, local, local.” She can’t see that the Convergence Bill or new Icasa moves will impact on them much, but she does want to extend the 702 footprint, which is in direct contrast to Deacon – who applied to extend the Kaya footprint, thought about it, figured that she would rather focus on the audience they know best, in the wealthiest region of the country, and withdrew the application.
How will an extended footprint and a focus on local marry? Gwangwa pauses and for a moment looks nonplussed, then smiles and stirs her cappuccino with extra cream, “we’ll manage.”
None of these challenges makes regulating radio easy, although Icasa chairperson Paris Mashile’s laid back air belies that. It’s difficult to pin him down on any issue – not that he is evasive, he just has an expansive, philosophical view of the media and its responsibilities. A trained physicist and electronics engineer who earned his degrees in the USA and England, the two areas he sees as particular focuses for now are “to bring down the high costs of communicating and to boost nodal markets and secondary markets in radio. This provides opportunities for the historically disadvantaged in communities outside the major metropoles. We will licence maybe two per province.
“The president has identified nodal points and these will become an extension of our community radio, places like Alexandra—” he gestures out of his office across the fields, highways and high-rises of Sandton toward Alexandra.
But Alex had a radio station, Alxfm, and it closed down because it couldn’t remain commercially viable. Mashile observes: “To run a radio station requires resources but it can ground to a halt if it is not serving commercial needs and has a weak income base. The problem for some of the community radio stations is that they serve very poor communities with no money for ads.
“It’s not just money they lack but training and education in how to run the station.” He concedes that perhaps the agencies that are there to assist these stations need to do more. “Icasa also has to establish what we need to tweak. Maybe big companies should adopt these radio stations. There is a collective responsibility between government and the private sector to address this.”
Mashile believes Icasa needs to be more innovative, a philosophy he says his father, Robinson Mashile, instilled in him. “He was a free thinker, very unorthodox, he rejected accepted dogma, he used to say, ‘use your mind’. He called me Paris from Greek mythology, Paris eloped with Helen, but he also identified Achilles’ heel as his weak point.” So what is Icasa’s Achilles’ heel? “We are not properly funded and we are regulating a very complex sector that contributes six percent of GDP. Our difficulty is that when we get good people, the industry soon poaches them, it’s a form of national duty to work here.”
Deacon agrees with Mashile that Icasa is not sufficiently imaginative in their national duty: “They have been quite tight in their approach, they haven’t really allowed themselves to experiment with the legislation they have. It has created problems at owner and shareholder level. People are looking for a return on investment and ways to expand business operations.
“A White Paper came out last year [the Independent Communications Authority of SA Amendment Bill, which is expected to come before parliament before the end of the year] where they looked at allowing any one player to own up to eight media outlets, and have foreign investment— everyone is waiting for that White Paper to go through parliament.”
At Icasa, and in parliament, there is no rush. Paris Mashile is twiddling the dials. His favourite radio station, he says, is SAfm. “I listen to the morning programmes during the week and I like Notemba Madumo from 9am to noon at the weekends. Overall, I prefer music to propaganda, when I grew up in Soweto we used to have an expression, ‘jy lieg soos ‘n koerant,’ I could never understand how the Afrikaners got that right.”
State of Play
In total Icasa has licensed 10 radio stations in Mpumalanga, nine in the Free State, eight in Limpopo, 12 in the Eastern Cape, five in North West province, 11 in KwaZulu-Natal, 15 in the Western Cape and 19 in Gauteng.
There are currently 13 private commercial broadcasters in South Africa, with six in Gauteng, two in KwaZulu-Natal, three in the Western Cape, one in the Eastern Cape and one in the Free State.
SABC has 18 radio stations.
Icasa has so far this year re-licensed 13 radio stations, and is considering six licence applications for the new nodal point radio stations.
The regulator’s Botlenyana Mokhele said that of the approximately 100 community stations licensed since Icasa began in 1996, 80 are still on air. Four commercial radio stations that have folded include: Capital FM (1997); Bop Radio, after SABC pulled the plug (2003); and Punt Gesels, which had two of its commercial stations closed down.