PEACEMAKING AIRWAVES
A former teacher has been establishing radio stations in an effort to bring calm to conflict zones in Eastern Europe and Africa
When David Smith secretly tuned the set his grandfather had given him at age six to Radio Moscow at night, he had no idea how far his obsession with radio would take him.
But after teaching secondary school geography in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, he was offered a month-long training session at the Johannesburg bureau of then Transkei’s Capital Radio.
“That month turned into, well, the rest of my life,” he tells the Financial Mail.
Now, 35 years later, Smith has become the go-to guy for establishing radio stations in conflict zones in order to ease tensions. The Montreal native is now more at home in the African bush than what he terms “the Québec bush”.
In the early 1990s, the UN asked him to set up a radio station in Yugoslavia, then tearing itself apart in a brutal civil war. “I set up a radio station in Vukovar in Croatia on the border of Serbia . . . It is still on the air, now a Serbian community radio station called Radio Dunav.”
Before long, he was setting up Radio Ndeke Luka in Bangui, Central African Republic, to assist the UN mission there in creating dialogue between contesting factions. Years later, he set up a similar station in Somalia.
But his favourite legacy project is in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
“At the time, the DRC was divided into three parts: in the west, the [Joseph] Kabila administration, based in Kinshasa; in the east, the area controlled by Rwandan-backed rebels, headquartered in Goma; and in the north, rebels backed by Uganda, headquartered in Kisangani and Gbadolite.”
Smith came up with a plan to launch a UN radio station in the five national languages — French, Kikongo, Lingála, Swahili and Tshiluba — that would cut across partisan lines and defuse tensions. He sold the idea to Botswana’s then President Ketumile Masire, who was having a torrid time trying to set up the inter-congolese dialogue, which aimed at a transitional government in the DRC.
With transmitters in Kinshasa, Goma and Kisangani, the UN’S Radio Okapi went on air on February 25 2002, covering the Sun City launch of the inter-congolese dialogue. “That immediately propelled us to number one position because it was national and covered all the rebel leaders . . . the UN special rapporteur to the DRC said that Radio Okapi had ‘electronically dismantled the frontline’.”
Radio Okapi has since established numerous other transmitters and has become one of the most respected news sources on the DRC.
Today, Smith’s focus is on Lake Chad, one of the world’s poorest regions, at the intersection of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon — and the heartland of the insurgency of the militant group Boko Haram.
He found that the radio initiatives in the area to challenge the Boko Haram message were sorely lacking and, critically, did not address the needs of the 10m Kanuri-speaking people who inhabit the borderlands but are underserved minorities in their own countries.
Smith says Boko Haram is merely a recent symptom of the neglect, bad governance and heavy-handed policing that have plagued the region since colonial times. The AU’S multinational joint task force “will defeat Boko Haram militarily, but what is missing — not part of their mandate — is dealing with the conditions that allow it to flourish”, he says.
So in January 2015, Dandal Kura Radio International went on air for the first time in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, where Boko Haram was founded in 2002, broadcasting a prerecorded programme in Kanuri for one hour a day on shortwave on an old BBC transmitter.
By April 2016, Dandal Kura was broadcasting live programmes for six hours a day, with news being fed in by correspondents in the rural areas.
Smith is learning rudimentary Kanuri, and says Dandal Kura performs as “a virtual town hall” where, for the first time, all Kanuri speakers can interact, whether officials and security forces or business and civil society; the agenda is set by the populace itself.
Smith says Dandal Kura aims to become the first truly African international commercial radio station after the Gabon-based
Africa No 1 was reduced to a Paris-based rump following the death of its funder, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011.
“I keep wishing someone would ask me to set up a radio station in the Seychelles, but no luck so far,” he says.