‘We want to tell the African story from African perspective’

Nigel Parsons, managing director/CEO, Continental Broadcasting Service (CBS), owners of Television Continental (TVC) and Radio Continental, in this interview with BusinessDay, speaks on the organisation’s readiness to go digital and its growing role as Africa’s voice in international broadcasting.

Continental Broadcasting Service (CBS) has become such a huge and diverse organisation in a short time. How has it been running such a fast-paced media organisation?

I have managed Aljazeera English, which is bigger and I have done four or five other smaller launches. What is different about this one is that it is very much an African project for Africans. Unlike say, Aljazeera, we can go and take people from the BBC, Sky, CNN or whatever. It was not so here; we had to train everyone from the scratch. It was a bit more challenging and much more satisfying.

You couldn’t just take people from a national broadcast here because they had that mind-set, which you cannot change. So, many of them are young people that were trained by us. However, what has worked more for us here is delegating authority. It’s very important that people learn to delegate. When I came to Nigeria, I found that most organisations were like pyramids; nobody wants to make decisions until they got to the very top. Here, we’ve got a very flat kind of management where every one in every department has responsibilities and makes their own decisions. As long as they are getting eight out of 10 right, they are doing a good job. Basically, I am the team builder, but everybody looks after his or her own department.

What prompted the decision to be a pan-African channel?

Before TVC, there was no pan-African channel. So the big foreign channel just parachutes in whenever there is a disaster. As it were, 99 per cent of the news coming out of Africa was bad news; there was no positive news. It has changed slightly now because CNN has Voice of Africa, and BBC has Window on Africa. But no one was really doing it through the African eyes. As it is, we want to report the good, the bad and the ugly. We will criticise what’s wrong, and praise what’s right.

That is why a lot of our programmes are celebrating the amazing things that are coming out of Africa- the culture, environment, music and so on. So, it’s a far more balanced view on Africa and it gives Africa a much more positive image in the outside world. We ‘ve got extensive distribution in the United Kingdom (UK), France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the USA. So, what we are doing in the way we are reporting Africa is not only being seen by Africans, but also by people outside Africa, who are beginning to realise that there is another side to Africa apart from famine and war.

What would you say are your major challenges in trying to tell the story of Africa from the Africans’ perspective?

I think the major challenges have been, as I’ve said, training people up to the right standard and leaving all the baggage of old style of journalism behind. It’s one challenge that is not really a kind of a pan-African identity. I have noticed some people in Nigeria are very much interested in what is going on in Zimbabwe or Mozambique, but you do have lots of things in common on the programming side, which we do. It may be environment, health, women issues, music, and dance- all those things you do have in common, which is why we have gone for the excellent programmes that we have. We are the first of our kind. We couldn’t get trained hands from anywhere else, so we had to train everyone and we’ve done it, now we have a great product.

TVC has three channels; enlighten us on what they are about?

One is an entertainment channel, however, it does have news and discussion programmes, but it has a lot of light entertainments like movies and kids’ programmes. Then we have the domestic news channel, which is really aimed at Nigerians and Nigerians in the Diaspora. And then there is a pan-African channel, which is probably the most ambitious in some ways. We are going up against the big international channels within the industry; I know we are doing well at it because we’ve received dozens of awards. We are competing against the likes of CNN, BBC and companies from Asia. So, we must be doing something right. Within the industry today, we are recognised as the prime pan-African channel.

You won the best station of the year award recently. How do you plan to sustain the pace?

We are the first channel of our kind, so, we are market leaders. Already, there are other people coming to the market. Our job is to keep pushing up to the next level, to stay ahead of the pack. We want to be the best channel for Africa. That is where we are at the moment. We are leaders of the pack now and our job is to hang on to that.

How are you preparing to meet the June 2017 deadline for the digital broadcasting migration?

Already, everything here is in high definition. Our infrastructure, our cameras, etc and we are already sending out digital test signals. So, we are ready.

In line with your pan-African outlook, what are you doing to consolidate your position in Nigeria and to further extend your reach to other African countries?

We are televised on other platforms in East Africa, South Africa, Zambia and Ghana. There are usually secondary platforms like Zuku in East Africa. Of course, it’s not as big as DStv. The demography of the average DStv subscriber is different from your own Zuku subscriber. It’s just like here; the DStv subscriber is different from your Star Times subscriber. So, it’s very important now that we are on DSTV to expand. At the moment, we are consolidating, and as our commercial position improves, we will look to expand our bureau network. Presently, we have bureaus in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra and London. We remain in South Africa, East Africa, West Africa and Europe. We will look to expand our network with time.

What is your short term projection for TVC?

In the short term, we want to own as many platforms as possible. Already, we are being approached by other international broadcasting organisations; they are asking us to partner with them in Africa. We have picked up dozens of awards both in Nigeria (we are Nigeria’s channel of the year) and outside. We are competing against the big established channels like CNN.