On Tuesday 14 September 2010 Sizwe Blose of Isolezwe continued with his charge of outright attack on Gagasi 99.5 through his weekly radio column. In a classic Blose’s style of one sided opinion making, he finds it fit to engage a friend about what Gagasi 99.5 is doing simply because his friend’s views are aligned to his agenda of discrediting us and the work that we are doing, but he doesn’t see the need to come to us for clarity on what we are doing.

Blose is telling us about his people who were surprised that we used our own platform to interact with our own listeners, and he chose to ignore the fact that our listeners, the people that the show was actually directed to, welcomed the initiative.

For the benefit of Blose and his friends, let me share what exactly the show was about, something that he would have benefited him had he engaged us from the first place before going ahead with his uninformed conclusions.

Primarily we decided to have the show of that nature to introduce Chris Meyiwa to listeners as the new Managing Director of the station for the purposes of enabling him to get an immediate sense of what our listeners think about the station. Having said this and considering that Meyiwa had served for only two weeks when the show was held, it was only relevant that his management team join him on the show together with the outgoing MD Rene Schutte. The underlying objective for any MD to read the market would be to understand what the market wants so as to properly structure whatever plans and strategy development going forward. Now we find it strange that someone would insult our listeners by claiming that “they were wasting their time when they called in” without actually understanding where our thinking was.

Blose is now defining what we were doing using his own interpretation of what a commercial radio station is and what it can and can’t do. He tells us what we did was wrong because some of our competitors don’t it. He tells us what we did would have been right if it was done by some of our competitors. He tells us that the only way we suppose to interact with our listeners is through utilizing the services of external research people, not through our own internal capacity as a station. For your information, Mr. Blose, we are not guided by what other stations do and don’t do. The fact that you can question what we do on the basis that other stations has not done it further demonstrate the extent to which you have no regard for us and our thinking.

In the same column, Blose, who used to have a feature on the public broadcaster’s radio station based in Durban and is also a weekend presenter in one community radio station, further argued that the only reason we had that show was to give Meyiwa a chance to enjoy the pleasure of talking on radio. According to him it’s a crime for anyone who holds a management position at Gagasi 99.5 to be on-air. Looking at this argument, one is only surprised when tracing the light management history of that community radio station he has a show on.

But maybe with all these links with other radio station, who in one way or the other are our competitors, one shouldn’t be surprised that Blose always holds these very negative sentiments about us.

To put it bluntly, we understand that with these associations with other radio stations, Blose’s views can hardly be objective or fair towards us nor can they ever reflect positively on what we are doing.