The ‘FrontPage’ takes a bow: The End of an Era?

Last week, with the news that Joy FM was cancelling its longest-running talk show in Ghana’s broadcasting history, the Front Page, hosted by the irrepressible, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, followers of the programme could not help but wonder if the cancellation marks the end of an era.

In this piece,  Dr.  Lloyd Amoah¹  and Kimathi Kuenyehia² , share their fond memories.

In its sixteen years, the FrontPage played with our emotions. It made us reflective. It made us laugh at ourselves and left us in tears sometimes. It made us believe in ourselves. In our country and its aspirations. And it caused us all to ask “why?” every Friday Morning.

If there ever was an emotional roller coaster, the FrontPage was its inventor. The one enduring value of the FrontPage was that it asked questions that lingered in your grey mass long after the show was over. In effect, it turned a very modern medium of communication into a blinding, penetrating flashlight that shone into the darkest corners of our national life.

Upon the announcement of the final run of the show, Kwaku Addo Sakyi-Addo was hailed a hero of free press, the conscience of the society, and as the man who made Joy Fm a critical voice in our public discourse. We know he is all of those things and more. Yet somehow, words fail to capture what is so remarkable about this man who consistently makes us feel good about ourselves by creating the only platform for intellectually stimulating conversation every Friday morning about the wellbeing of our Republic.

But because the FrontPage was on radio for so long, an entire generation grew up following the Front Page without fully understanding the entrenched ignorance and anti-intellectualism the show fought against and helped to lessen.

To truly appreciate the FrontPage is to understand what was before the Front Page. The obstacles the show and Kwaku encountered, and how that only goaded him on to continue asking incisive questions of panelists who often did not know what they were talking about. Spin doctors, rabble rousers and anti-intellectuals were generally unwelcome. The follow-ups to his questions only made such philistine minds look stupid as they reeled under his perspicacious questioning.

Ever self effacing, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo should accept that in his command performances on the FrontPage, the credit is his ( and to a lesser extent to Joy FM) for crafting the era of the talk show host as smart, intelligent and yet cool. 

His personality gave the FrontPage its gold standard: credibility, empathy, consistency, verve, unforced style and cerebral turbo-charged intensity. He truly raised the bar. In our life time, we will be blessed to experience another of our compatriots of his caliber command the airwaves like his very home and with such deftness. But for all his influence, he remains humble. Just as words can't fully capture the role he has played all these years, so they fail to describe the void he is going to leave.

We remember the cascading cadences of West Nkosi’s infectious “Village Bump” (the very first signature tune of the FrontPage) take captive whichever space you occupied as the FrontPage was unfurled every Friday. The tune always had a harbinger feel to it.  At once, poignant, sad and elevating.

The tune poured out on a mellow mood on the back of strings and then just when the deception is complete, the drums emerge to join in a majestic euphonious mish mash glued together by Nkosi’s saxophone. The saxophone literally talks at the hands of this jazz meister as if spinning some mysterious yarn intelligible only to the initiated.

Of course, the Republic’s breathe is in abeyance from Ga-Mashie to Woe Upon-Cape St-Paul, to Nkroful and to Zabzugu-Tatale. The voice of Kwaku, seemingly reluctant to unveil another class act, takes the baton from Nkosi. That throat clearing ritual repeated almost a zillion times precedes a clear, crisp, measured, well modulated announcement: “Good morning. This is Kwaku Sakyi-Addo and this is the FrontPage.” 

The airwaves, thereafter, will host intellectual banter at its most sophisticated and finest. And then the Republic will recover its collective breathe from thence. At least, for an hour, we had our sanity back before the useless chatter all week until another Friday. And then to the next Friday. It was always worth the wait.  

And so we ask: why will Joy Fm axe this talk show? Why will it try to block such a powerful shard of light with its bare hands? Why singe what has become almost an institution? 

Very sad.

Truly, the end of an era.

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¹ Dr. Lloyd Amoah is an Assistant Professor at Ashesi University College, Ghana.
² Kimathi Kuenyehia is a transactional Lawyer.