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Cultural Ambassadors:
The American Voice of Abuja Radio

There is a distinctly American voice purring through the airwaves over Abuja. It is coming out of a brand new radio station, Hot FM 98.3 in the Nigerian national capital.

The new station first caught my attention about two months ago. I was sitting in the car one morning outside the bank waiting for my wife. Her trip into the bank had begun to stretch and, with nothing to do while waiting and just to keep myself from following her in there, I began to flip through the dials on the car radio.

There are at least ten radio stations with strong signals within the Abuja area. Some of them, like Capital FM and Ray Power, were already familiar companions of mine in my drives through the city. Almost all have a strong Nigerian flavor -- a mixture of news and politics, heavy doses of commentary with a lot of religion thrown in as well as African (and some American) music.

Meet Patricia, a mechanical engineering major from the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom. She is in Nigeria on holidays and working at Hot FM as assistant to the GM

Then I came across this one station, Hot FM 98.3. I had never heard it before and there was something different about it; something that captured all of my attention. It came through in the voice of one of the on-air announcers. It was a voice with that comfortable African-American drawl and ease with the English language. I had no doubt the announcer was an American and I knew immediately I wanted to talk to him for the Global Village. I took down the call-in number they gave out on-air that morning.

Listening to Hot FM 98.3 radio feels like you had tuned in to an American station with a rhythm and blues format hooked on the music of the 1980s and before. The station is about 80 per cent music, but the commentary and on-air banter that goes on back and forth between the Black American voice and a female companion adds an erudite element to the mostly music format.

A few days later I called the station asking to speak with the 'American' announcer. I was invited to come to the station.

I met Chaz Bruce, the American voice of Abuja Hot FM 98.3, toward the end of April 2005. Chaz is a very personable man in his mid forties. He took me up to his office and we began to chat. I wanted to know why and how an American became the 'voice' of an African radio station.

It turns out Chaz is really a Nigerian-American who had spent the last 26 years studying and living in America. He went to the United States in 1979 and immersed himself in the American culture. Chaz is married to Margaret, an African-American schoolteacher. Together they have six children. Chaz is by himself in Nigeria; his immediate family is still in the United States. Margaret is a schoolteacher with the Palm Beach Public School in Florida. His first son, Jonathan, is a 22 year-old university student majoring in film production and broadcasting at Florida A&M University.

Chris Okenwa, aka "Chris Double 'O'"  came to Hot FM98.3 from Australia. He is the DJ in-charge of music selections at the station.  Listen to him on air

Even before he left Nigeria, Chaz had always moved within the entertainment world. He worked with his cousin, Ben Bruce -- a former Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) -- back in 1975 when the later owned the Fantasy Night Club in Yaba, Lagos.

After his studies in the United States (he majored in Travel and Tourism), Chaz returned to the entertainment business. He ran a limousine and bodyguard service catering just to celebrity and VIP clientele. Through that business he came to know people like Donald Trump and Natalie Cole on a personal basis.

Business was going well until 2001. September 11, to be exact. That was when the terrorists struck. "It just seems like everything went downhill from there. It was a shaking up of the US. America took a beating financially. It was a pivotal point for me, any way," Chaz says.

After the September 11 bombings in New York and Washington DC, security conscious Americans began to change their habits. Many businesses, especially in the tourism industry, took a beating as a result. Limousine companies lost a lot of the ground transportation business that used to come in from the now struggling major airlines. Chaz's business never quite recovered after that. He gave it another year, but after September 11, 2002, he decided it was time to make a move. "I decided that things had gone bad enough in my business where I needed to take a closer look at Nigeria."

Chaz Bruce at work in the radio studio

Chaz visited Nigeria in 2003 and had a chance meeting with Chris Anyanwu, a well-known personality in Nigerian media. She was once a cabinet minister in the government of Imo State, Nigeria. Eventually she became publisher and editor of a print publication called The Sunday Magazine. Anyanwu is a gutsy professional who, as a journalist, got into trouble with the government of former Nigerian dictator, General Sani Abacha, and was thrown in jail for years during the Abacha era. After her release from jail at the death of Abacha in 1998, Anyanwu spent some time in the United States. Today she is the owner and CEO of Hot FM and TSM Television.

Chaz met Chris Anyanwu through mutual friends. At the time, in 2003, Ms. Anyanwu was running the TSM weekly TV program on the Nigerian national television network, NTA and working to start up a new radio station. It was her opinion that he had what it took to be a TV personality and over a period of months Anyanwu persuaded Chaz, but he was initially reluctant. He had very little experience for radio and none at all in television. However, Anyanwu, the veteran journalists, was sure she had the right man in Chaz. She had a vision of him right beside her as the male face of TSM TV and invited him to tryout for the spot, and the rest, as they say, is history.

With Chaz on board, Anyanwu now had time to devote to getting her new radio venture off the ground. In January 2005, a year and a half after Chaz came on as the face of TSM TV, Anyanwu's radio station, Hot FM 98.3 Abuja, made its debut. Chaz was on-hand to introduce the new station to the residents of Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory.

Today, Chaz is general manager for both the TV and Radio stations and the face of TSM Television as well as Voice of Hot FM Radio. He looks after a young (average age 23) and enthusiastic staff at both stations, many of them expatriate like himself.