Abstract
Wana Udobang, a leading talk show host in Lagos, Nigeria
CREDIT: TY Bello
Don’t get me wrong, we Nigerians can be very expressive people. If you have been around us long enough, you know that our ability to express ourselves is void of reserve. We are as spicy as our food. But prior to my time as a radio host, we spoke about many things in hushed tones. In fact we were walking skeletons clothed in secrets.
From 2010 every weekday for more than five years, 7pm was fraught with a strange tightening in my chest, along with an air of excitement, as I sought divine courage to handle the plethora of stories, debates and contributions I would have to moderate for the hour.
The range was huge. There was the lady who had been sectioned in a psychiatric hospital for six months after being jilted at the altar; the man who tried to jump off a bridge after losing his job and felt ashamed for being unable to provide for his family; the woman whose four children belonged to somebody else but who pretended that the medication her husband was taking for his impotence was working; the man who took in a son from an extramarital affair because of his wife’s difficulty conceiving; the parents who lost their child to medical negligence; the pastor who raped the choir mistress; the imam who assaulted little boys at Islamic school; the woman with epilepsy who was constantly exorcised for demonic possession. And, of course, there were the more general phone calls about the debilitating educational system, the terrorist insurgency and the failures of political leaders. From the familial and systemic to the political and social, whatever topic had or hadn’t seen the sun we talked about it.
The thing about letting loose for the first time is that somebody had to carry the weight, teach you to manage the emotional spill-over and empower you with names for your experiences, and that is how my role evolved from radio host to quasi-therapist.
Radio has always been a part of the Nigerian experience, whether it was listening to the BBC on short wave or the government-run Radio Nigeria. We have had an interesting and tumultuous radio history from military coup announcements to political censorship. During the rule of Nigeria’s military juntas from 1966 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1998 there was censorship on the airwaves. Today there is nothing so obvious.
It was only a matter of time before affordable mobile technology would revolutionise not just the listening experience, but would change the way in which people started to interact with the medium, so they became an integral and intimate part of the creative process.
There are two very special things about radio. First, the anonymity it provides helps listeners mitigate any kind of shame. This is one of the reasons why documentary and memoir are not thriving mediums of storytelling in these parts. For communities that pride themselves on being family-centric, shame is taken very seriously. This means that no one person is sole owner of an experience and so when you do decide to share or express yourself, it is often viewed as detrimental to others who are seen as co-owners of that experience by virtue of being family. It’s one of the reasons why most phone calls would always begin with “Hello, good evening Wana… Please may I remain anonymous?”
Shame also holds people back from reporting crimes to the police, as well as a fear of victimisation or the general sense that the criminal system is inefficient and ineffective. No such shame existed between me and my listeners.
Secondly, radio provides the inclusion that television doesn’t. Anybody with a transistor radio or a phone with an inbuilt radio could listen to the programme. We were told between 700,000 to 1.2 million tuned into the station and my show was its flagship. So a lot of people listened.
Those who could pay for the cost of the call could join the millions of Lagosians and Nigerians jamming the phone lines waiting for their turn to say something - and this access to phone lines really is huge; according to the Nigerian Communications Commission in 2016, mobile phone operators run 147 million telephone lines alone in Nigeria. It’s unlike television, where markets are seg-mented between terrestrial and cable, the latter of which is paid for.
This also means that radio is bridging class divides, becoming a platform that empowers people from different social, political and cultural groups to have a voice and be represented. It inadvertently allows room for people from different backgrounds to learn from each other. In a city like Lagos, known for its social and economic polarisation, inclusion isn’t something to which the city’s culture naturally lends itself. And in this rapidly growing metropolis, where traffic and congestion are a huge part of the daily struggle, radio seemed to lend itself as a revolutionary tool for the people to express their angst during rush hour on my show.
I was often overwhelmed when I would drive to a bank and be recognised by both the manager and the security guard, or attend church on Sunday to be greeted with an unexpected familiarity by the parking attendant and a congregant in an SUV.
In this class-obsessed culture, where poverty can be stifling, radio made people’s voices valid.
Well Connected
According to a 2015 study compiled by Jumia, a Nigerian online shopping site, Nigeria has the most mobile phone subscriptions of any African country, and the 7th highest mobile subscriptions of any country in the world
In the same study Jumia found that 46% of the Nigerian population (approximately 180 million) were online during the beginning of 2016. Of these, 70% accessed the internet through their mobile phones
In a Gallup report released by the Broadcasting Board of Governors in 2014, it was stated 77.4% of surveyed individuals listened to the radio at least once a week, making radio the dominant news platform of Nigeria