By Isaac Massaquoi
The governing board of the West Africa Democracy Radio have what could be the last opportunity to do something radical about a radio station that promised so much but has delivered so little that many people who applauded the idea of setting up a radio station to promote open governance in West Africa of all places are today quietly re-thinking their support for this initiative.
In the beginning, the Open Society Institute for West Africa, OSIWA wanted the radio to “be the hub for a West African network of public, private and community radio stations; creating an avenue for networking between these radio stations and a channel for dialogue among peoples of the respective countries they serve.” In those days parts of the sub-region were in the grips of civil war, cruel military-backed dictatorships and governments that kept themselves in power by planting fear and terror in their peoples.
In the Mano River Union, the station’s first target area, Sierra Leone had a weak civilian government with Tejan Kabbah as president. Rebels were busy ravaging the countryside. Guinea under Lansana Conte called itself a civilian government but the truth is that the military has never truly been out of power since the death of that country’s charismatic president Ahmed Sekou Toure; and in Liberia Charles Taylor was at the height of his power.
Taylor had driven opposition voices underground or abroad. Among those opposition people was the current president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. In fact she was at that time the chairman of the board of OSIWA, the organisation supporting the work of an ever- growing number of civil society groups that were by now beginning to re-discover their voices inside the MRU and in other parts of West Africa, and the new radio project.
The OSIWA board was made up of failed or aspiring presidential candidates all over West Africa and this was naturally bound to cause some uneasiness among the leaders of the sub-region at the time.
According to official documents, the radio’s mission was “to promote and defend the ideals of democratic and open societies, advocate for mutual understanding, respect between and among individuals and communities, promote peace and human security, transparency and accountability in governance, regional economic integration, and social and cultural development amongst the peoples of the region.” And WADR was going to use its “programs to provide the forum for various viewpoints to create understanding among individuals and between individuals and their governments.” As you will appreciate, this was a very challenging responsibility for anybody in West Africa at that time. With the background of those people administering George Soros’s money on those projects, the job was only going to be made even more difficult.
The original plan was to locate WADR in Freetown, recruit the best Journalists in the MRU to produce high quality programs and drive the democratic transformation in the region through. One of the best Communication Experts in West Africa, Sierra Leonean-born Liberian Lamini Warritay was hired to lead the process on a very decent salary even by European standards. That, to me, signalled OSIWA’s determination to achieve the highest standards.
Warritay managed to get the necessary papers from the Independent Media Commission. He recruited his staff and brought in some equipment to start work. In one of my programs on state TV, I interviewed Warritay about the project and the overall mission of WADR. A lot of people in the MRU were excited about this project. In a somewhat bizarre twist, Tejan Kabbah’s government squeezed the IMC to withdraw the station’s broadcast license.
When I interviewed the IMC boss at the time, Francis Conteh and Bu-Buakei Jabbie who was one of the Commissioners, on the same program, with Lamini Warritay in studio, they struggled to explain their action while at the same time rejected my suggestion that Lansana Conte and Charles Taylor in particular had put pressure on Tejan Kabbah to throw WADR out of Sierra Leone. In fact before that interview, I had seen transcripts of an Executive Mansion news conference given to me by a Liberian colleague, in which Charles Taylor had described WADR’s presence in Sierra Leone as a direct interference in Liberia’s internal affairs. He even insinuated in a veiled manner that he would take action to stop the radio going on air.
Tejan Kabbah will reject this even today because it will make him look very weak. But I find no other plausible reason why after taking a correct decision, the IMC would, after less than six months reverse its own decision by clinging like a drowning man would do to even a straw, to an undefined national security consideration. WADR was not even on air at the time. That incident went straight to the heart of Kabbah’s approach to governance.
At the time Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf who was nearing the end of her term on the OSIWA board came to Freetown to, among other things, try and clear the blockage in the way of WADR. She failed.
I interviewed Johnson-Sirleaf at Bintumani Hotel just before she departed for the Akosombo talks on Liberia that brought Gyude Bryant’s interim government into office in Liberia. As you can imagine, with half an hour in hand with this great politician, I pushed the current president of Liberia very hard on many issues. And on the subject of WADR, I still remember her telling me that she expected Tejan Kabbah to be “a strong leader” but was “disappointed” Kabbah had been blackmailed by Taylor. It was on that program that she announced that President Abdulai Wade had invited George Soros to take the radio to his country, Senegal. Many in government didn’t like the whole Topical Interview program. And they did certain things to convince me they wouldn’t tolerate my attempt to “turn SLBS into BBC”. I clearly understood them but I plodded on.
So WADR was effectively out of the MRU and by the time I became a member of its board, the region was in a different situation in terms of governance and I pushed very hard for the station to return to what is its natural habitat. But this was not to happen. I lost interest in the whole project and decided not to attend any more board meetings in Dakar, because the radio was having no impact on anything in the MRU, not to talk about West Africa.
Even our efforts to link a string of community radios in Sierra Leone and Liberia, funded by OSIWA in a program exchange network with WADR was dogged by technological difficulty, unavailability of funds, inept management and allegations of corruption. The WADR boss that was to drive those ideas through was forced out of office under a cloud after her visit to the region trying to set up the structures. Since then, I am not sure WADR has re-discovered its original mandate.
In my days on the board, I was also shocked by the way WADR spent money. I still don’t understand why the station spent a fortune paying a service provider for shortwave broadcast time when all over West Africa, FM transmission had taken over and the distortions that come with tuning in on shortwave were now things of the past.
WADR is on the brink again and I refer you to our front page story to understand what I am talking about. This presents a big opportunity for OSIWA, the backbone of WADR to re-focus their effort towards producing tangible results.
With respect to those on the project, it’s a little arrogant to assume that they can broadcast from Dakar without any links to local radio stations in other countries in terms of program or even personnel exchange and still make an impact even if they generated some of their content from countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia. In fact, their offices in Sierra Leone and Liberia exist only in name. There is no equipment, the staff have not been paid for two months and people just don’t feel the presence of WADR in their communities because the link with community radio stations has been cut because of lack funding and the inability of the station to syndicate its programs, which I have to say are of reasonably good quality. This situation has seriously affected the station’s ability to generate content locally using country-based reporters.
Here’s what I think going forward: WADR should take its transmitters off air and transform itself into a production house and use some of its money to properly re-establish the country offices and revive links with the community radio stations to broadcast their programs. It makes no sense trying to be the BBC of West Africa when you can only cover Dakar. The ball has hit firmly back into OSIWA’s court. At this point I doubt it very much whether even the WADR board should survive the kind of root-and-branch reform some of us think should happen.
