ON THE AIR: The Eastern Cape station manager building rural youth skills through the airwaves

Since joining Bulungula Community Radio in 2018, Sikelela Thobigunya has been involved in expanding the station’s footprint from a brief afternoon slot to a 13-presenter powerhouse connecting rural villages in the Eastern Cape’s Xhora Mouth Administrative Area. As the station awaits a key licensing decision from Icasa, it continues to serve as a central hub for youth skills development and local news.

Sikelela Thobigunya, the 31-year-old station manager of Bulungula Community Radio, has loved the airwaves since childhood. Over the past eight years, he has dedicated his time to building the small broadcaster, based in the Xhora Mouth Administrative Area of Elliotdale, Eastern Cape, into a hub for youth development and community news.

Standing with Daily Maverick in the colourful rondavel that houses the community station, Thobigunya’s passion for the project is unmistakable. In between answering questions, he pops his head into the broadcast booth to make sure one of the team’s most popular programmes, The Mid-Morning Fix, is running smoothly.

When Thobigunya started at the station in 2018, shortly after completing his matric, there was only one other presenter, who doubled as the station manager. The station was on air from 2pm to 4.30pm daily.

Now, there are 13 radio presenters from the local villages, almost all in their 20s, running 16 programmes. The station’s schedule runs from 5am to 9pm from Monday to Thursday, and from 7am to 9pm at weekends.

The Bulungula Community Radio among the projects that fall under the local nonprofit, the Bulungula Incubator.

Thobigunya grew up listening to the radio with his uncle, who enjoyed a variety of stations in different languages. It was during this time that his love of broadcasting was born.

In 2016, while he was still in school, Thobigunya added all his classmates to a WhatsApp group and started recording his own informal radio segments, which he sent to them regularly.

“Those 16 students, they motivated me every day. One of those listeners on my WhatsApp was someone from this area, and that is the one who told me about [Bulungula Community Radio],” Thobigunya recalls.

Thobigunya travelled to visit the station, which was about three hours from the village where he lived, in late 2017. He left his details there and received a call to pitch his programme ideas to the station manager in 2018.

“I said, let me focus on a traditional music show, because my role model was a presenter doing traditional music on the national radio… at UMhlobo Wenene FM,” he says.

After joining the radio station as a present