The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu
THE debut of Skyz Metro FM last month has been a silver lining for Bulawayo made music in 2016, a year in which the perpetual cloud that hovers over the city’s arts seemed to have grown heavier and darker.
With the country’s economy limping, the year has been harsh for the arts in the city, with the few opportunities present in previous years seemingly disappearing as belts tighten.
Shows have been poorly attended, traditional arts funders have withdrawn support and even Intwasa, the trusted beacon of light that city artistes gravitated towards every year, was subdued because of a lack of sponsorship.
So when Skyz Metro’s surprise and sometimes unsure signal started filtering into homes in and around Bulawayo, the aspirations of many a Bulawayo artiste seemed closer to realisation.
After months of promises and postponements, the dream of a station that dedicate every second of its broadcast to the tastes and lives of the people of Bulawayo was alive and breathing for everyone to hear on 100.3 FM.
Amid the wild euphoria celebrating the station’s coming there was a voice, old and wise, cautioning that the enthusiastic should turn down the decibels and instead focus on whether the quality coming from the station was worth all the pomp.
Promising to give the powers that be at the station advice on where to take Skyz Metro if it was to meet the expectations of the hard-to-please people of Bulawayo, Cont Mhlanga left the peaceful serenity of his Lupane home for Bulawayo where he was to decide on whether Skyz Metro was worth all the hype.
“After two weeks I will be able to tell if bringing radio to Bulawayo was a dream worth having. If the station is rubbish I will tell the CEO that it’s rubbish and they should stop wasting space. If it is good I will also again say so,” he said a fortnight ago.
Two weeks later, Mhlanga is now able to point out the flaws and the strengths of a station that has a difficult if not impossible task ahead of it.
Skyz has come into a Bulawayo radio scene where the established national players have dug and planted deep roots. Stealing the ears of listeners from the likes of ZiFM, Star FM and even SFM will not be an easy task, as the slick and polished programming of such stations will be hard for Skyz’s talented but largely amateur team to upstage.
Not only does Skyz Metro have to outshine these apex predators at the top of the food chain, they also have to win over an almost always sceptical Bulawayo that seems to have a phobia for all things local that are not named Bosso (Highlanders Football Club).
This is a challenge that Mhlanga, after his assessment, believes Skyz is ready for.
“After two weeks I can safely conclude that there is a lot of talent. You can’t help but marvel at some of the talent that’s on display here and you wonder where the other stations were looking if they don’t have such people within their ranks.
“There’re a lot of inexperienced young people with one or two veterans. The veterans that are there still have the salt and their contribution has been invaluable,” said Mhlanga.
What has given Mhlanga the greatest pleasure however, is the quality of sound that can be gleaned by those in range of the station’s frequency.
“My main worry from the beginning was how the station sounds. Radio, after all, is all about the sound. The sound is great and that is at a time when it’s not even functioning at full capacity yet,” he said.
Despite the enthusiasm caused by the young talent buzzing at the station, Mhlanga notes that some of them are still yet to master the essentials of top class radio. In a market where Skyz is trying to outmuscle well established competitors, this might be a problem.
“In most programmes the presenters are rushing. We are trying to teach them that radio is not a marathon and so there is no need to hurry but instead you have to draw the listeners in. Rushing creates problems because it messes up their diction and delivery,” he said.
Since its debut, Skyz Metro’s reach has been hit and miss, with its signals failing to wrap the whole of Bulawayo under one umbrella as promised. If the whole of Bulawayo is to consider letting Skyz Metro voices into its living rooms, the station still has a lot do to patch the disturbing holes in its signal reach and strength.
“We have to look at the positioning of the station’s antennas because reaching places like Esigodini has been a problem so far.
These days people listen to radio on a lot of devices and they’re not yet able to do that with Skyz. However, some of these problems are also due to the fact that they’re still setting up the Digital Desk which in itself is a complex unit of a machine,” he said.
The station’s digital desk is expected to be up by November by which time Mhlanga, who went back to Lupane this week, expects the glitches to have been ironed out.
One of the unwanted bumps derailing Mhlanga’s vision of a smooth running Bulawayo centred station is that the Skyz, which broadcasts from 2pm to 12 midnight, repeats the same programmes when it is off air. In an environment in which competitors always seem to have at least one eye up throughout the day, 14 hrs of no live programming represents too long a snooze.
“Things will change from 1 November. For now 2pm to 12pm is not bad. What I have a problem with is programmes starting late which has been happening frequently. That will not be tolerated in future and once we have all our equipment in the house we will broadcast like any other station,” he said.
Mhlanga expressed delight in the music brought in by the city’s musicians.
“Before we started I was worried that they wouldn’t bring in enough music to sustain a station. I have really been pleasantly surprised even though most of the music is from one genre. However, I would advise Bulawayo’s young musicians to take their time and properly master their songs,” he said.
Listeners to the station have always been chuffed by the programme, Vuka Vuka Breakfast Show, anchored by singer and comedian Babongile Sikhonjwa, which broadcasts in the morning from 6am to 10am.
