Former CNBC Africa and SAfm anchor, Siki Mgabadeli is set to begin hosting a new daily business show to launch on eNCA (DStv 403, SKY 517), South Africa's most watched news channel, on October 1st 2014.The show, airing at 9pm Monday to Friday for 30 minutes will be hosted by Siki from Monday to Thursday with current eNCA business anchor, Arabile Gumede (himself a former CNBC Africa personality) at the healm of the show on a Friday.
Along with hosting the new show, Siki now also takes on the role of senior business anchor, which is a snub to Gumede who has been with the channel since December 2013 doing business news as part of News Night.
Siki is, of course, no stranger to eNCA audiences. She anchored the channel's election day coverage earlier this year from 12pm-6pm, hosted the Big Debate that jumped from the SABC to eNCA, and also frequently appears on air as part of cross overs eNCA has with the radio station she is currently with, Power FM, during events like the State of the Nation Address or the Opening of Parliament.
The only problem I have with the new program is its timeslot. It airs 2.5 hurs after SABC News' business show with Francis Herd has ended, BDTV and CNBC Africa's decent primetime business schedule has begun to draw to a close and Tirrin Cossaway has done indepth business reports on ANN7 Prime.
But eNCA is doing their best to make sure that the new program will still be appointment viewing to the business audience. They are doing this by basically removing all the interviews and in depth analysis from Arabile Gumede's business news inserts on Afternoon News and Newsnight and adding them to this show to ensure that it is not old news to the eNCA audience. This will then lead to the problem that Gumede's inserts on Newsnight and Afternoon News will be very vanilla considering the channel now no longer want to give the big business news stories away in those slots, which is a mistake on the part of the channel.
The 9pm slot is als a slot that eNCA has traditionally avoided to program anything but general news bulletins in. The reason for this is that at 9:30pm the channel has shows like The Tech Report and Late Night News with Loyiso Gola, which is basically non-"real" news for 30 minutes before another general news bulletin at the top of the hour. Adding a daily business bulletin at 9pm means that viewers would have to wait a full hour before having another proper news bulletin on eNCA.
Not only does it mean a full hour without news on eNCA, but it also means that in the 9pm hour there would be no english South African news on, well, any South African news channel as SABC News runs stale non-live African language news in that hour and ANN7 has an old I Am South African in that hour.
Other than the timing of the new business bulletin, which is yet to receive an official name, this is an interesting move by a news channel that has generally avoided niche news bulletins.
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