BBC To Fire Over 380 Staff, Nairobi Office To Be Affected

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will embark on radical changes that will 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 proposes to initiate a digital structural transformation of the World Service with aim of serving global audiences better.

It is 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.

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

“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 could see the state broadcaster do away with some of their programmes in different regions, some of them which had focused on 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.

Sources privy to the matter told Viral Tea that the move could see over 50 journalists based in Nairobi working for the BBC lose their jobs, with the media house already begun doing communications with the journalists by the time of publishing.

“We are also proposing to create new roles, targeting more content creation for digital output as well as investing in training,” Liliane however noted.

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.

The BBC World Service opened its Nairobi bureau in 1998. It now broadcasts in a total of 12 African languages - plus English.

The official opening of the new bureau in 2018 coincided with the launch of Money Daily, a new business TV programme, one of several new shows that are produced in Nairobi.

In July the broadcaster detailed plans to merge BBC World News television and its domestic UK equivalent into a single channel to launch in April 2023.

BBC World Service, one of the UK's most recognisable global brands, currently operates in 41 languages around the world with a weekly audience of some 364 million people.

Eleven language services; Azerbaijani, Brasil, Marathi, Mundo, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese, are already digital only. Under the restructuring plans they will be joined by seven more: Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Pidgin, Urdu and Yoruba.

Radio services in Arabic, Persian, Kyrgyz, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil and Urdu will stop, if the proposals are approved by staff and unions.

No language services will close, the broadcaster insisted, although some production will move out of London and schedules would change.

BBC offices in the United Kingdom. /FILE 

The Thai service will move to Bangkok, the Korean service to Seoul and the Bangla service to Dhaka. The "Focus on Africa" television bulletin will be broadcast from Nairobi.

Landor noted there was a "compelling case" for expanding digital services, as audiences had more than doubled since 2018.

"The way audiences are accessing news and content is changing and the challenge of reaching and engaging people around the world with quality, trusted journalism is growing," she added.