Celebrated radio host, Jackie Lumbasi, is leaving Royal FM in Kigali after five years during which she steered Kigali’s first English radio breakfast show.
She announced on Wednesday that it was time to end her time on ‘The Heartbeat of Kigali’.
Lumbasi joined Royal in 2018 to co-host the breakfast show Kigali in the Morning. For over a decade, she had been at Capital FM in Kampala doing The Big Breakfast Show.
Amidst the craze that Alan Kasuja, Ramesh, Gaetano Kaggwa, Oulanya and Marcus Kwikiriza represented, many listeners found sanity in her calm demeanor and voice of reason. Even more outstandingly likable was her husky voice and Kenyan accent.
And she had won hearts over the years.
Shifting to Kigali was sudden. Initially, her plan after going off air was to lead comms at Capital FM. Then, an opening at Royal FM led the management to reach out to her for her CV.
When she moved to Kigali, she said it did not occur to her that anybody there knew her or that there were many Rwandans who came from Uganda.
“When I came to Kigali I thought it was a fresh start, and that I was going to prove myself to an entirely new audience,” she said in a 2018 interview.
Following her formal resignation, Lumbasi is set to leave on January 12.
“It has been an incredible experience. Kigali gave me a chance to fall in love with radio afresh, I made new and super friends,” Lumbasi tweeted on Wednesday.
She also recounted how challenging working in Rwanda was especially at the start. She would be hosting an English show in a market where her biggest competition was a breakfast show in Kinyarwanda.
From the onset, the endeavor – steering the first English breakfast radio show in Kigali – to change the market trends was “an act of faith”.
“I’ll never forget how many times I heard of Sandrine, Arthur & Kiss FM and how people recognized a defunct Royal TV, not the radio I worked for. For a radio oldie, that’s the blow that pushed me to work really hard to change the story of this radio that was now my home.”
But the hard work finally paid out. Eventually, some of the clients who initially didn’t believe in the show finally returned to take up advertising slots.
Royal FM continues to position itself as the English-speaking station of choice, targeting especially the expatriate community and Kigali’s middle class audience. This in part informed by Rwanda’s decision to pivot from French as the language of instruction in schools, to English.
To cement its position as an English-broadcaster, Royal FM has handpicked talent from Kampala where the media industry is highly competitive, first with Lumbasi, later Lady Bezo (2022) and most recently Daudi Ogutu (2023).
On Twitter, many reacted to Lumbasi’s announcement with regret. At the same time celebrating her for waking them up each morning and the good vibes.
Fred Martin Kiwalabye, a media consultant in Rwanda told Plugged that he will remember Lumbasi as a presenter who was the best at it.
“Her contribution towards the station has been tremendous, her sparkling warm voice has shaped the airwaves of the Rwandan industry considering she pioneered the first English breakfast show in Kigali,” Kiwalabye said on Wednesday.
At Royal, Lumbasi doubled as the station manager. She was also a columnist with the state-owned newspaper New Times Rwanda.
