HOW I HANDLED THE MARGARET SITUATION ON AIR?
By Garries Wamundila
One day l was doing a live phone-in programme with guests in English on Manyinga Heart FM, in North Western Province. Many callers made contributions in Lunda & Luvale. l literally couldn’t understand anything they were saying. Luckily, l was quick to ask one of the guests to explain what each caller said before they respond to the concern.
What happened to ZNBC’s Margaret Chisulo can happen to any other presenter who is not familiar with some languages, but wisdom and professionalism has to be employed in the handling process. Every listener must always feel welcomed and their views respected regardless.
Therefore, fellow presenters let’s learn from her experience and see how best to navigate around the language barriers with a great sense of humour without being discriminative or disrespectful to the masses.
To Margaret, l don’t condemn or judge you, it’s just that l feel sensitivity lacked in the handling process such that not only the concerned caller (Ms. Muyunda) was injured, but the people who speak the language she spoke.
Honestly, I actually fail to listen to the whole scene because l feel as if it’s me handling that and am thinking of how the other party would have felt.
The truth is we all make mistakes in one way or another. How we rise when fall and the lessons we draw from our stumbling determines how we deal with similar situations when they reoccur in future.
I submit!
This is part of the learning curve. There is no need to condemn the young lady. ZNBC should learn from this incident and provide official guidelines relating to such situations.
They must go further and anticipate similar situations with a view to provide employees with guidelines. In the absence of that, each individual employee will handle the situation in the best way they can think of.