My Focus on Africa story

After almost 63 years of continuous broadcasting, the BBC Focus on Africa programme has come to an end. 

Well, it does still exist as a podcast, but you would understand that for some of us of a certain age, you can’t really talk about Focus on Africa except as a live, riotous programme that broke the story of the death of General Sanni Abacha and, I hold my breath, the death of Otumfuo Opoku Ware, the Asantehene.

This was the programme which was obligatory listening around Africa for decades, it was the programme that many people turned to when they wanted to find out what was happening in their own countries.

Not surprisingly, the programme lost its bite in the past two decades once private radio stations came to be allowed in African countries, and you could hear alternate viewpoints on your own local station, its days were bound to be numbered.

But that time was still far away when I joined Focus on Africa back in 1986 for what I thought would be a six-month stint whilst I recovered from the collapse of Talking Drums, the angry, weekly newsmagazine I had been producing in London with my two friends who had also been chased from the Daily Graphic, Ben Mensah and now sadly passed, Kofi Akumanyi.

(The Talking Drums story too will be told one day.)
Robin White, the editor of Focus, (I am not using legendary to describe him because he doesn’t like words like that), dominated the programme totally with his personality.

He did not understand and wanted nothing to do with bureaucracy.

He just wanted to produce a good programme and nothing should stand in his way; not rules, not sentiments and certainly not the budget, nothing was or should be impossible.

For many years, I was the deputy editor and we can safely say that we made an interesting pair.

Focus

The telephone bill for Focus was always a nightmare for the BBC, but we always got away with it because the programme we produced brought a lot of kudos to the organisation.

We discovered and nurtured a lot of talent and it was widely said that if you survived at Focus, you were ready to succeed anywhere in the broadcasting world.

At the time I joined in 1986, there were only four countries on the African continent that you could dial directly from London and our network of stringers around the continent sent their stories by telex and later by fax and these were edited in the Focus office and read by producers, which at the time, were almost exclusively Englishmen with BBC voices that sounded like the BBC, clipped, upper Middle-Class, posh, public-school educated English.

For years, many listeners must have thought Sola Odunfa our legendary stringer in Lagos (Sola wouldn’t mind being described as legendary and it is a well-deserved adjective to describe him), sounded like Julian Marshall or Rick Wells or Robin White who were the ones that read his stories, which he sent by telex and later by fax.

I must say that it took a while for my Ghanaian accented English to be accepted by the BBC establishment and the listeners who did not easily accept the introduction of what was called an African accent in the BBC output.

Maybe I am overstating the accent matter, the truth is I had no difficulty in fitting in at Focus on Africa; after all, I already had under my belt, some 13 years of reporting, writing, editing at the Daily Graphic and The Mirror (or Sunday Mirror as it was called when I joined), and three years of Talking Drums.

Indeed, the BBC felt they had got quite a catch by convincing me to accept a job with them.

I had been hesitant about radio as I thought I was a written word journalist, but without my realising it, the six months I had agreed to do soon stretched on and on and my hesitation about radio disappeared and I had become a broadcaster.

In the event, I stayed at the BBC for 14 years. 

Downing Street

They must have become satisfied with me quite quickly because in less than two years after I got there, Robin White and I were at Downing Street, the home and office of the British Prime Minister.

We went to interview Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was about to embark on her first official trip to Africa.

After the interview, her communications director who had been present during the interview in the study, indicated his deep displeasure with us.

“You have not done yourselves, or the BBC any favours you know, throwing all those polemics at the Prime Minister.

You will not be getting any interviews for a long time and that would go for the whole of the BBC”.

I wasn’t going to let him get away with that and I told him I thought his assessment of how the interview had gone was quite wrong as it seemed to me that Mrs Thatcher had thoroughly enjoyed the robust questioning.

As things turned out, when they came back from the trip to Africa, Malawi, Morocco, and Kano in Nigeria, their attitude to the interview changed.

Downing Street was now, in fact, very pleased with the interview and we were told that everywhere they went they had met people who told them how much they had enjoyed the interview.

For the first time, Downing Street had experienced at first hand, the power and reach of Focus on Africa:

“Everywhere we went, people seemed to know Robin White and Elizabeth Ohene and everyone we met, seemed to have listened to the interview”.

If the bosses in Bush House had been rattled by the Downing Street protest, they must have been glad they had kept their nerves.  

Probably the one thing about which we had the most soul-searching discussions and anguished arguments in the Focus office, was the perception of Focus as the programme that gave space to opposition and rebel causes.

It is a perception I would happily have carried with pride since there wasn’t much room for alternative voices on the lone state broadcasters those days.

But things changed somewhat with the telephone call that came to the office on Boxing Day, 1989, from a certain Charles Taylor who said he had launched a rebellion in Liberia against Master Sergeant turned President Samuel Doh.

The rest, to borrow the hackneyed phrase, was history.

Charles Taylor was a dream interviewee and he and Robin White were to have many verbal sparring sessions on the programme and it appeared the Liberian civil war was being fought on our airwaves.

Rebellion

Some accused the programme of supporting rebellions.

All you need to start a rebellion is to get a satellite phone and call Focus on Africa, we were told.

When Laurent-Désiré Kabila rang to say he had invaded Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and was about to chase out its leader Mobutu Sese Seko, we almost didn't use the story, for fear of being accused of instigating rebellions.

But my most memorable times on the programme were outside the office and in various parts of Africa.

My first “duty trip” as it is called in the BBC, was to Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana; then I discovered the Horn of Africa and then I got to South Africa and much later West Africa came. It is a long story.