Spotlight on media excellence

•  Hamusokwe leads media training reforms at UNZA

Dr Basil Hamusokwe with Philipp Semmler, a media expert from Switzerland

VICTOR KALALANDA AND BONIFACE MUKOPA, Illinois, USA, Thursday, December 9, 2021*

Few individuals will end up with an enigmatic legacy at the University of Zambia (UNZA), or even rise to klieg-lit fame through sheer excellence as academic leaders.

One example is the great Ghanaian, the late Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill, founder and first dean of UNZA’s law school, and the first editor of the Zambia Law Journal who established what is today known as the Zambia Institute of Advanced Legal Education (ZIALE).

Under Bentsi-Enchill’s leadership, the law faculty went through an auspicious era, occupying centre stage in legal services, training, research and education in Zambia.

Today another academic leader, Basil Hamusokwe, who holds a doctorate from the prestigious Centre for Communication, Media and Society at South Africa’s University of Kwazulu Natal, is accomplishing a similar feat.

Heading UNZA’s Department of Media and Communication Studies that is set to become a school, Dr Hamusokwe has been leading reforms aimed at providing media studies programmes that will be critical to Zambia’s economy.

“We do realise,” he says, “that the Department for a long time was the only institution that offered a bachelor’s degree in communication until later on other universities came in and started offering that same programme in different ways. So for a long time it’s the department and perhaps Evelyn Hone that produced students or graduates in media and communication studies or journalists, even PR. So we realised that we were offering too much in one programme.”

Dr Hamusokwe has thus been at the centre of diversification, considering a needs assessment for Zambia, to create academic programmes that solve Zambia’s media challenges in the 21^st century.

The result is that UNZA will, on one hand, be offering a heavily practice-oriented media and journalism studies degree for journalists and, on the other, create  a communication science degree for professionals interested in media at conceptual and analytical levels. This is besides public relations and advertising training, as demand–driven programmes.

 “We’re in these privileged positions where we interact with people that are always requesting us to offer certain courses in photography, public relations and in advertising, so through that we realise that there is need out there for people to be trained in these areas,” he says.

And in addition to growing student leadership opportunities, it is under Dr Hamusokwe’s administration that the Department has undergone a major facelift and established its reputation as perhaps the only institution in Zambia that integrates theory with practice through industry standard labs in print, radio and television broadcasting.

Not only does the department publish a student newspaper called the Lusaka Star, but it produces actual television programmes through its Digital Media Hub and engages a greater part of Lusaka through community-centred broadcasting on UNZA Radio.

What this means is that the media sector in Zambia shall annually receive a competitive cadre of highly trained media professionals, at both graduate and undergraduate levels, who will drive institutional and ultimately economic growth.

Hamusokwe has over the years sustained a strong interest in education to be able to preside over such sweeping reforms in his own department.

“One thing that my parents were keen on is education. My father took it upon himself, for example, to teach us how to write. We’d sit with him and try to learn. I remember sitting with him and scribbling things and him coaching me how to hold the pen,” he says.

His academic career began after obtaining his bachelors and masters degrees in mass communication at the University of Zambia, and also after working as a print media journalist in Lusaka.

Fascinated by challenges of media sustainability in Zambia, he decided, as a 29-year-old, to undertake PhD studies in 2013 in South Africa, where he drew upon the Zambia Daily Mail and now defunct Post newspaper to produce a study on the sustainability of a free press in Zambia’s Third Republic.

After receiving his doctorate, Hamusokwe came back to Zambia to take up a strategic leadership position, which he is using to refocus media training at UNZA, so that it is as responsive as possible to Zambia’s needs.

“In terms of the postgraduate programmes, we’ve the Master of Mass Communication and Master of Communication for Development, so what we’re now working on is to introduce new and specialised programmes. These will be in political communication; for example, the master’s in political communication, the master’s in health communication and we’re also trying to introduce a master’s in public relations. So these are programmes that we’re actively working on with colleagues,” he says.

When launched, some of these programmes will be offered in collaboration with other departments at UNZA, such as those specialising in politics and administrative studies.

Hamusokwe’s own leadership style has inspired generations of students, who look up to him as a transformative academic leader, who also serves his students with an altruistic concern for their needs.

“His  . . . style,” says Caroline Chinyanta, a media student at UNZA, “is something one would emulate and the tactics he’s used to reform the [media studies] department really are amazing. Not only do they help shape us as media students, but also they bring out the hidden potential and skills in us. By this I’m referring to the introduction of the Digital Media Hub. It’s a great way to start for the department to own one of the biggest television stations. I really applaud him for this and many more reforms made this far.”

Another media student, Marjorie Mwelwa, says that “Dr Basil’s leadership style is more of fatherly and paternal. As the head of department, he makes sure each student gets an opportunity to have access to facilities that the department offers. His reforms are up to date. For example, journalism has now gone digital, so the introduction of the Digital Media Hub is an example of up-to-date reforms at the department.”

As a PhD researcher from South Africa, what Dr Hamusokwe clearly brings to the media studies department at UNZA is an academic rigour and an enthusiasm for critical teaching and research, which appears endemic in South Africa among young academics that are breaking ground in their fields.

The UNZA media studies department itself produces a decent amount of research in the form scientific articles, book chapters and academic theses every year, some of which are presented in a colloquium at UNZA.

Even amid COVID challenges, the department has employed a blended learning approach to ensure that all students, whether studying from campus or at home, maximise on their media training.

For an institution that started in 1984, the strides so far made at UNZA’s Department of Media and Communication Studies are a sign of tremendous progress.

With such promise offered by leaders like Dr Hamusokwe, not even the sky is the limit for media training in Zambia.

*Original copy was first published in the Zambia Daily Mail on the stated date