RB call-in programmes monotonous

| Thursday February 28, 2008 00:00

Not a single day passes without Radio Botswana engaging in one of her incessant call-in programmes.

The broadcasters seem to want to outdo each other with the number of phone calls they can bring into the studio. Thus you have from Monday to Saturday programmes such as Live Line, Talking Heads, Maokaneng, A re bueng, etc. Not satisfied with these many talk shows they decided to rope in Masa a Sele - the morning show. So these days instead of receiving informative antidotes in the morning before we leave our homes for work we are bombarded with boring phone calls about bad roads and the like. Gone are the days of 'Masasankegi', 'Peretshitswana' and beautiful African rhythms to see one off to work! You can imagine the effect on our productivity. Entertainment is an integral part of what services a radio station can offer to its publics. And that entertainment can have a positive impact in improving productivity by way of boosting the national morale early in the morning and giving those returning from work something to relax and prepare themselves for the next day. Radio Botswana must never lose sight of this fact. Especially since for most of the, day its programming is taken up by schools broadcasting.

Further, in spite of their proliferation there is absolutely no difference in the subject line of what these many call-in programmes deal with. Just last week Masa a Sele's call in segment talked at length about the new Motor Vehicle Accident Fund act, only for the same topic to pop up on Maokaneng later that day. Clearly there is no justification for this high number of call-in programmes. One or two such programmes per week should suffice as they all talk about the same things anyway. What is even more demoralizing about these programmes is that they are aired at a time when most of us are returning from work. So when the majority of the hard working citizens of Botswana come home from a tedious and hot day at work and need to tune to the national radio to perhaps find some relaxing music and jovial titbits, all they hear is the uninspiring babbling of a few individuals who seem to have nothing else to do but to call Radio Botswana notice that a handful of individuals have turned the national radio into their play ground? The call-in programmes achieve nothing at all other than play into the hands of these hobbyists. Listen to any call-in programme and you will not miss a call from Dithato, Motswapong, Baabina 1 and 2, Direlang, Motho a Modimo and his wife, Pandora, Kuke Kolo, Makgosa and their cronies. Sometimes they just call when they don't even know what the topic of discussion is!

Finally, these programmes achieve absolutely nothing. In this day and age of performance improvement and monitoring somebody at the national radio must have seen the ineffectiveness of the call-in programmes by now. The fact that a negligible minority of the listening public manages to monopolise discussions each and every day is evidence enough that the rest of the listernership is not interested in the phone calls. So if the call-in programmes were intended to gauge public opinion on national issues they are certainly not achieving that. Instead they fatigue and demoralize the nation with their monotony and incessant frequency. We need more life and vibrancy on our airwaves.

Something must be done before this continuous drool of boring talk shows kills national morale once and for all.

Galefele P. Maokeng
SEHITHWA