BBC Moves Broadcast Of Dira Ya Dunia Show To Nairobi Office

Odit would be supported by Peter Mwangangi, a senior journalist at the media house as well as Agnes Penda and Anne Ngugi who will be journalists at the show.

Marvin Chege Marvin Chege
Apr 5, 2023 - 18:27 Updated: Apr 5, 2023 - 18:28
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BBC Moves Broadcast Of Dira Ya Dunia Show To Nairobi Office
An image of BBC office in Nairobi. /FILE

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announced on Wednesday, April 5 that the Dira Ya Dunia TV show would be broadcast in Nairobi, Kenya.

New BBC Swahili Editor Athuman Mtulya in a statement on Wednesday, April 5 that the show would be based at the British state broadcaster's bureau office at Riverside, Nairobi and Roncliffe Odit would be the Dira Ya Dunia lead presenter

Odit would be supported by Peter Mwangangi, a senior journalist at the media house as well as Agnes Penda and Anne Ngugi who will be journalists at the show. However, Mtulya announced that there was one more role left.

A past photo of BBC's Roncliffe Odit. /FILE

“We’re very pleased today to announce that after extremely competitive interviews, we have made the following appointments to the Dira ya Dunia TV team in Nairobi, the lead presenter will be Roncliffe Odit, and Peter Mwangangi joins the team as Senior Journalist. Agnes Penda and Anne Ngugi will be the Journalists.

"We are still in the process of recruiting one more Journalist role,” Mtulya announced.

He also revealed that Elizabeth Kazibure and Frank Mavura will join the team but will be working from Dar es Salaam as a senior journalist and journalist respectively.

The Dira Ya Dunia show airs every day from 6:30 PM and focuses on matters that happen across East Africa.

Odit joined BBC from Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) in 2018, while Mwangangi is a senior Business Reporter who has been at BBC since 2018, having previously worked at the Nation Media Group (NMG).

Anne Ngugi joined BBC in 2018. She took to social media at the time to celebrate her huge milestone as the host of Dira Ya Dunia programme that airs at BBC Swahili (Nairobi Bureau).

The changes come months after BBC became one of the first media houses in the last quarter of 2022 to embark on radical changes in September 2022 that were estimated to see over 380 journalists across the world lose their jobs.

The United Kingdom (UK) media house, which also has a bureau in Nairobi, stated in an internal email that it proposed to initiate a digital structural transformation of the World Service with aim of serving global audiences better. It was aiming to cut down its expenditure on international news content and services by Ksh3.8 billion

"We need to immediately reduce our spend on international news content and services by £28.5m, and prioritise budget and resources on the content and platforms that will provide us with the best foundations for the future in each language service as we continue to evolve and develop our digital offer just as our audiences and markets evolve.

“We expect there will be reduction of around 380 roles in total around the world, including the UK. This total number also includes roles in news Content and News output, as well as Operations,” BBC World Service Director Liliane Landor stated in the email seen by Viral Tea.

The proposals were anticipated to see the state broadcaster do away with some of their programmes in different regions, some of them which had focused on the African content.

BBC proposed to stop a number of word services among them Africa genre TV which offers programmes in English that include Business, Sport, Health, Children’s, She Word, The Breakdown, and Kenya Connects.

BBC's office in Nairobi is the largest outside the UK, with close to 300 of the 600 journalists working across Africa based in the state-of-the-art facility. The production facilities at the bureau include a TV studio and two further live broadcast positions, two radio studios, two radio workspaces and five TV edit suites.

BBC's mass firing notices led to almost every media house in Kenya following suit in what morphed into a crisis affecting the Kenyan media.

A presenter presenting the Money Daily show on BBC. /FILE