Avid listeners as well as music lovers in Kano and environs would have a lot to savour as Freedom Radio 2 set to begin operation this week. The Managing Director of Film Laboratory and Production Services Limited (FILAPS), owners of the broadcast media outfit, Alhaji Faruk Dalhatu tells ADAMU ABUH that Nigerians should expect more in the days ahead, noting that his organisation is keen on emerging as a major player in the broadcast industry in Nigeria. Excerpts:What informed the setting up of a new radio station'FREEDOM Radio applied for licence seven and a half years ago with the aim of going to many places, the vision of the company, which is to have an integrated multimedia organisation that encompasses Radio, Television, and Newspaper and of course, the new Media that is Internet based. We have accomplished the radio objective for the past seven and half years, going to eight years now, and we have been publishing Freedom Express, a weekly for the past 20 months and we are working on the TV licence. We are also working on the new media angle. Already, we have a website that is getting busier by the day and we are able to stream Freedom Radio live now. Right now, we are a two-station organisation. We have one station in Kano and another station in Dutse, Jigawa State. Next week, our new station, the Freedom Radio F.M 2 is going to commence operation in Kano. This is basically going to be an entertainment station. Since we came in by popular demand and expectations of our listening public, we have slanted this time around towards a TalkRadio. So, we are more talk and less music. Now, we have opportunity to go more music and less talk. So, we will be able to fully serve the different needs of our listening community in kano. The other licence that we have gotten in addition to Freedom Radio 2 in Kano are licenses to start broadcasting in Kaduna, Sokoto, and Maiduguri. We are currently keeping an eye on Abuja, Lagos, PortHarcourt, Warri and some other parts of the country. With these six licences this has placed us as one of the key players in the industry ' at least in the independent broadcast industry in Nigeria.Can you shed more light on the added value the new Freedom FM 2 radio station will add to your listeners in Kano and environs'Because of the way we came in, we were the very first independent radio station in Northern Nigeria that is indigenous to the people. When we came in, we had a lot of people trooping in with goodwill messages and of course request for them to be part of the Freedom train. And in the process, while we were entertaining this request, we were building our popularity, we realised that that our programme profile had suddenly turned into an A.M kind of programme profile ' i.e. more talk, high quality programming where you had to deal with health, women issues, education, youths and several other societal issues. So, we realised that we had inadvertently squeezed entertainment out of Freedom Radio. For us, the entertainment sector caters for 15 ' 36 demography that needs a lot more entertainment than it need issues-based talk. So, we wanted this group to have vintage Freedom Radio quality programming in this entertainment sector by the time this Freedom FM 2 radio station becomes operational. The youths and the young at heart are the audience we want to capture this time around.Can you shed light on the kind of music that your listeners will expect from your new Freedom Radio 2 FM station'I have to take you back to when we started Kannywood industry was young then, especially the musical part of the industry where a young artist would do music on cassette, because at that time, CD was not popular and they would go and record and would keep looking for where they would go and play as the existing media outfit didn't have a place for them. They were branded all sorts of names ' some called their music indian, others said they were vulgar and so on. They actually found it difficult to get people to accept new wave of Hausa music that allowed the use of keyboard and modern musical tools. But then came Freedom Radio, we embraced them, we got married to each other and they embraced us. Today, they have cut over 200 different songs for Freedom Radio. We started paying for it, but now they are doing it for us free out of love. In return, we gave them a platform to showcase their talents and a lot of them had gone ahead to become very popular outside the spheres of our listening area. That is the most gratifying thing to me that we have done. Now they get patronage to the extent that no commercial jingle would be deemed to be successful unless it is produced by these young men and women. Now agencies come to them from Lagos with ideas and tell them to develop scripts and jingles for them and they get rewarded. I say to you, thanks to Freedom Radio and that partnership is still there. And we are going to put that partnership to an excellent use because plans have gone very far as Freedom Radio is going to institute the first internationally accepted Hausa music award come December 1, The day would also coincide with the birthday of Freedom Radio 1. So, every December, we would be having music award on Nigerian music as it is done in the USA. Aside from this Hausa based music, we are going to take on Nigerian music and promote it especially in our area where there is less of Nigeria music in our radio stations. We will create relationship with Nigerian musical artists and as we did in Freedom Radio 1, we have reached out to major ethnic groups and we are giving them a belt, especially to those who have a preponderance of relations with Kano. We will give them their music hours and it is going to be something that has never happened to Kano before.What is the coverage area of the new Freedom FM 2 station'The coverage is going to be almost the same as that of Freedom Radio FM 1 because they are practically sharing the same facilities though the FM 1 is on a bigger power transmitter, and the antennas are much higher than those of FM2, but it is going to cover a lot of space the Freedom 1 is covering. For the FM1, we cover the entirety of Kano State, we cover about 80 percent of Jigawa state, about 50 percent of Kaduna, about 50 percent of katsina, cover Yobe and Zamfara in lesser degrees from kano. We also reach Niger Republic. They monitor us from Maradi and Zindar but that is an unintended stray signal of sort.Why is the Radio listening culture so well entrenched in Kano and other parts of the north'First of all, we are in an enclave that is considered the most avid listening enclave in the world; here everybody listens to Radio. You find that after series of survey, people listen to radio at least once a day here and there are people who listen to Radio for upward of four hours a day.So because of the peculiarity of radio as it relates to our socio-cultural life here, you don't need to be educated to get information from the radio; you don't need to live in the urban centre where you require power supply to be able to listen to radio. In fact, you don't even need to own one as you can go to the nearest tea seller and listen to your favourite programme. Radio, unlike other media, does not require all your senses to be able to obtain information from it. In fact you can do other things while it is on and once a key word is mentioned, you will quickly turn your attention to the Radio to pick up your information unlike other media where you have to look at it, analyse the picture, the meaning of the word for people or what the writer wants to say. So, this is why it is very convenient for people to obtain information through the radio. I believe that because we are meeting those needs, that is what has made Freedom Radio successful.Explain why the management of Freedom Radio wants to extend its tentacles to other parts of the country'We think we have a lot to offer in terms of high quality programming because we are successful in Kano that is a hotbed for politics, religion and socio-cultural activities. Since we have succeeded here and people like what we are doing, we think that the rest of the country stands to benefit from this kind of quality in Radio journalism that Freedom Radio is renowned for.How is the patronage of your media outfit like'We as a matter of corporate responsibility ab-initio decided to take the most difficult road of achieving patronage by giving high quality value for what we get back from our clientele. We have never, ever asked for or accepted grants or free money from anybody or any organisation. We have chosen to deal with everybody that comes to us on the basis of reciprocity. We will give you service and you will pay us and that payment is what we use to keep going and stay alive. We realised that the only way we can survive is to continue to give out high quality programme to attract listenership. Our advertisers know that this is the Radio that reaches out to the targeted audience than most of our competitors. For every naira you spend, you reach much more ears than what others reach.With the entrance of more FM stations into Kano, can you cope with competition in the days ahead'We know that getting up there is the easy path and staying up there is going to be a lot more challenging. We got up there because we were the first and we kept faith, our listeners kept faith as we kept fine-tuning our programming to meet the needs. We have also met the needs of our advertisers. Now that new competitors are coming, we intend to even give ourselves the competition first; we want to give our listening community a delicious dilemma; we want to put our listeners in a situation whereby they will have to take tough decision on whether to listen to Freedom1 or Freedom2 because we are going to come up with extremely high quality programme that will divide the minds. So, we are not afraid of competition; we will in fact compete with ourselves and we are not unmindful that any competition that comes will also have to eat from our market share.
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