Edward Kwach: Born into law, found a home on radio

 Edward Kwach in studio. (Photo/Bryan Amulyoto, Spice FM)

Edward Kwach, the voice, the radio icon, the reason many Kenyan radio listeners never touched that dial back in the day.

When we catch up with him, he is preparing for his second show at Spice FM, his new home.

When you meet him you understand why his voice is all the rage. It doesn’t just sound like that on radio. The baritone is his regular speaking voice, now with an additional touch of age. Maturing like fine whiskey. Kwach, 48 years, smooth.

But it’s not just his voice. He also has what seems like thousands of sound bites ready to go at a moment’s notice.

We ask him to speak into the camera for some extra shots away from the main interview and he does it effortlessly, many times, multitasking — walking and making jokes in the middle of it, never missing a beat.

The man was built for radio. Which is strange, because law is in his blood. He studied law, and his father was the famous judge, Justice Richard Kwach. His father had been a lawyer when Kwach was growing up, but a number of high profile cases brought him to prominence and he ended up becoming a judge.

“I think the one that people would know is that there was a prominent lawyer called SM Otieno and his widow Wambui wanted to bury him at a place called Matasia somewhere in the Ngong area code and the clansmen said no. That he had to be buried at his rural home,” he says.

“So then he became a judge in 1988, straight to the Court of Appeal and the rest as they say is history.”

Kwach followed that route but eventually the pull of the media proved inescapable. He had first got into media at 14 through a Coca Cola marketing campaign, and since it came so naturally to him, he seemed destined for the microphone.

He still uses his legal expertise for contracts and such, but his talent is enough that he has gotten well and clear of his father’s shadow, something the children of prominent personalities usually can’t escape.

“The main thing that I do see with children of prominent lawyers or any child who follows a father who is a larger than life figure, if you try and get into that same vocation, people don’t take you on merit. They say, ‘Nah this one is there because of his father.’ Follow your own path,” he says.

He did and had runaway success, at one point being the number one radio host with the number one show and was the number one emcee.

Things are different now from when he was first on radio. The insult, ‘You have a face for radio’ is now ancient because there are cameras in studios.

“I have been at this game for a while. The first radio station I walked into was Capital in 1996. And you know, clearly, studios then and now have changed, because now it’s audiovisual,” he says.

“Before coming to Spice FM, let me put it this way, it was just audio. So when the music was playing you could do basically what you want. Back in the day, guys used to gaffe in the studio. These days, because it’s audiovisual, you have to care about how you look, and I’m gonna try and improve on that!” he says with a laugh.

Things are also different now because of social media, which was not a thing back when he was the king of radio.

“Back in the day, before social media, which my producer calls the socials, when you are up to no good or something happened, if you wanted to spread the word, it was the newspaper or phone calls. Or take a picture. That was about it,” he says.

But that hasn’t changed who Kwach is as a person. “I don’t duck and weave. I like to be an honest soul. I don’t like to be a pretender,” he says. “The thing about a newspaper, it’s there now and tomorrow it’s over. But as one of my mentors told me, the things about the internet is that it never forgets, man. So do you, but be careful.”

Bad moments

And he would know. There is one highly publicised incident he was involved in that the internet never forgot. It saw him muted from radio and nearly broke him. It would be the second time he would be taken off radio, the first time being because of alcohol. He speaks candidly about it.

“In 2003 I red-carded. The first time. I was doing the breakfast show with the great Caroline Mutoko. I left that one because of indiscipline. Just basically didn’t turn up to work. I was cooked. Cooked means ‘hangied’,” he explains.

“Then I went to Tanzania. Then I was asked to come back. That was in 2006. Ten or eleven months into that second stint, there was a function somewhere and during the course of this function I was dispossessed of my wallet by one famous msanii.

“The week after that, I saw him, we were at a function. There was an altercation, he got injured and of course that was gross misconduct.”

As a result, he was let go, for the second time.

“That was crushing, of course man. Because I was on a good run in Tanzania.... So I’m like, ‘You know, you should have controlled yourself better.’ Because you know, I came back, but life is evolution. So I’m like, ‘Because of this, that happened.’ It crushed me, man. It crushed me.”

After that, it took him a couple of years to get back to radio, and did a few stints on different stations. He was retrenched in 2013.

Life of an entrepreneur

“By that particular point, because you can see when people are trying to downsize, a few of us had gotten together and said, ‘You know what? We’ve been in this game and we know the game extremely well. Let’s open up our own station – Urban Radio,” he says.

“We said, ‘Look. We’ve done this dance for such a long time.’ So you get a marketing guy there, you get a business guy, you’ve got venture capitalists to come on board… Devolution had just started. We said, ‘You know what? How about we just go to the counties and let’s get an English radio station out in the counties and let’s try and devolve money as well?”

So that’s what they did, and Urban Radio was born. But it didn’t go so well.

“You see, the thing about business is that everyone has got to be on the same page and share a common interest. So people started clashing. Interests started diverging. Suffice it to say, by the time we had got to six, seven months, because you see in business, especially as a startup, it’s the J effect.

“You’ve got to have the money to sustain your business for 18 months. Because if you don’t, things are tight. And most people get out when it’s literally at the bottom of the J, when it’s just about to climb. But after that I was jaded. By June 2014, I remember it was the FIFA World Cup.

“One Friday, I decided enough was enough. You start insulting each other and so on, so one Friday I’m like, skip it, and even them they’re like, ‘Skip you.’ So I said Ok, let’s remain in partnership but I’m not going to be on board on the ground. It was acrimonious, to say the least.”

After that, he got into media advertising which is his forte, imports and exports before his grand return to radio on Spice FM on Spice Drive with Monique. If his determination is anything to go by, the listeners are in for a treat.

“Well, between 3pm and 7pm, Monday to Friday, we are basically not only going to do magic but we’re going to try and create history,” he says.

“This is the Spice Drive. It is going to be earnest, entertaining, informative and if you are one of those people who are like, ‘Okay there are those others but we definitely want the best amongst the rest’, you gotta tune in.

Being media practitioners in the presence of one of the greatest ones, we ask him for tips. He looks directly into the camera and shakes his head: “No strip clubs. Number two, keep your head above the water and duck the bullets. Avoid politics. Number three, honestly, consistency. Number four, lastly, this is a vocation about grit.

“Once you’ve got that basic iota of talent, please be professional, be consistent. You’re only as good as your last link and don’t believe the hype.

“Don’t tell yourself you’re the best. Let other people brag that about you, but the day you believe that you’re the best and you tell yourself that, it’s a wrap. Cool it. Even Michael Jackson, till the day he died, he didn’t believe he was the best. We told him that. That’s what it’s all about.”