Primedia Broadcasting Splits the CEO Seat as South African Radio Confronts Its Digital Reckoning

Two people will now share the top job at one of South Africa's most influential radio groups. Primedia Broadcasting has appointed Kelvin Storie and Mzo Jojwana as co-CEOs, a dual structure the company says is built to defend its market-leading broadcast business while pushing harder into digital. For anyone tracking where African media money is heading, this is less an HR footnote than a strategic bet: the oldest mass medium on the continent is being reorganized around the audience it still owns and the screens it does not yet.

The division of labour is explicit. Jojwana takes the content and audience side after nearly two decades in South African radio, including stints as station manager of 702 and chief content officer at Primedia Broadcasting. His remit has covered the group's flagship brands — 702, 947, CapeTalk, Kfm 94.5 and Eyewitness News — spanning content strategy, audience growth and operations. Storie, who spent more than two decades in media and marketing, rose inside the same company from chief intelligence officer to chief commercial officer, and now oversees an integrated offering across audio, video, digital and experiential platforms. Group CEO Jonathan Procter framed the pairing as formalising a complementary split: Storie's commercial acumen alongside Jojwana's content expertise, protecting broadcast dominance while accelerating digital innovation.

To understand why this matters, you need the local map. Primedia Broadcasting is not a niche player. Its stations are among the most recognized audio brands in South Africa, and talk radio in particular carries outsized political and commercial weight in a country where call-in shows shape public argument. 702 and CapeTalk anchor the news and talk format; 947 and Kfm 94.5 dominate music radio in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively. Eyewitness News supplies the newsroom muscle feeding those frequencies. In a market where terrestrial radio still reaches millions daily and advertising budgets remain deeply tied to it, controlling this portfolio means controlling a genuinely scarce asset.

That scarcity is precisely why the co-CEO model reads as a hedge. Radio in South Africa has proven resilient — Jojwana calls it one of the country's most powerful and resilient media platforms — but resilience is not the same as growth. Advertisers are shifting budgets toward streaming, social video and digital audio, and younger listeners are fragmenting across platforms. The company's own framing acknowledges the tension: the new structure exists to protect and grow the core broadcast business while simultaneously driving digital innovation, audience engagement and incremental revenue. Storie's language about making content effortlessly accessible and simplifying solutions for clients points to the commercial pressure: clients want fewer, more integrated buys, not a menu of disconnected stations.

Zoom out and the appointment speaks to a broader pattern in African media wealth. Family-owned and privately held groups across the continent are wrestling with succession and reinvention at the same time, often without the luxury of a deep bench. Primedia's answer is to split the job rather than choose between the operator who knows the newsroom and the executive who knows the advertiser. It is a structure that can work when roles are cleanly drawn — and can stall when they are not. The company is presenting it as a signal to the industry that long-term success hinges on the symbiosis between trusted content, engaged audiences, commercial partnerships and digital innovation.

What to watch now is execution, not the org chart. Can two co-CEOs move faster than one on the things that actually matter: converting radio loyalty into digital subscriptions or registered audiences, building video and podcast products that advertisers will pay premium rates for, and holding talent in a small, competitive pool. South Africa's broadcast market has buried bold restructures before. This one will be judged by whether the audience follows the brands onto new platforms — and whether the revenue follows the audience.