The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Business Reporter
WHILE Ke Yona TV has also found itself reeling from the effects of Covid-19 after its launch and several programmes were pushed back by the deadly pandemic, the first Bulawayo-based commercial television station is targeting May as the month in which it will make its debut on the airwaves.
Ke Yona was one of six TV stations that were awarded licences in November last year and one of the conditions under which the licences were granted by the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) is that the stations were to begin broadcasting within 18 months. Failure to do so, the licences will be availed to other aspirants through a similar process.
With the arts in limbo due to the Covid-19 regulations in force around the country, Ke Yona chairperson Cont Mhlanga revealed that the station had also not been spared, with a launch scheduled for January having had to be shelved.
“Things are hard right now at Ke Yona because of Covid-19. As you can recall, we already had a setback with the luncheon. This was supposed to be done on 30 January. We were supposed to present the brand to the corporate world, media and other stakeholders. We had to call that off,” Mhlanga told Sunday Life.
The station, Mhlanga said, had to forego a lot of pomp as it went virtual in order to follow Covid-19 guidelines.
“We have however, come up with a new strategy of launching the brand. We have decided to look and go with how and where the virus is flowing. We have decided to go virtual with an event which will do that in a very big way. Plans now are therefore currently way ahead and negotiations with key partners for it are in progress at very high levels,” he said.
Mhlanga said the station had set its sight on the Africa Day celebrations on 25 May as a possible launch date.
However, he said any celebrations would be complicated by the fact that a lot of people not only in Zimbabwe but around the continent were in mourning due to the death and destruction wrought by the epidemic.
“This for Zimbabwe is a setback because this is about Africa and it is about our country celebrating with the rest of the continent but how do we do that with all these deaths and people in mourning? We are going to do something and instead of it being about Bulawayo or Zimbabwe we are instead doing it for all content creators in Africa. Covid has forced us to go virtual. The Africa Day celebrations were meant to be the day where we activate the brand and present our personalities, producers and our content line-up. So how then does Zimbabwe participate as a country with this havoc . . . the challenge is bigger than we all think. However, I insist that there must be a silver lining somewhere,” he said.
While BAZ had given the stations 18 months to get their act together, Mhlanga said that the month of May provided the station with a chance to flex its muscles and give viewers a taste of what it has to offer.
“We are now in the process of finalising and getting our content line-up for the festival. We are planning to make this an Africa Month celebration beginning from 1 May and climaxing on 25 May where we are going to be broadcasting live for 24 hours. It is going to be very difficult but like I said, the one thing that we are doing as Ke Yona is to look for a silver lining in this dark cloud of Covid-19,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ke Yona has revealed that it will be dropping 51 people from the list of personnel that had been shortlisted to be part of the first commercial TV station to be based in the City of Kings.
“We have arrived lapho okunzima khona (where it is difficult) where we have to offload 51 people who we had shortlisted. We now move into individual legal documents to be signed and into serious protected company information and processes as we go into programme commissioning, then into more contracts and agreements, then into training for all the selected people and finally into production. More people in this remaining list will be dropped during the process mentioned above,” Mhlanga said in a statement.
The veteran playwright and TV producer encouraged those that had made the cut to keep focused as they had not made the grade. One personality, referred to as Jiyane, had been let go because of failure to adhere to the station’s rules and regulations.
