Letters: Radio station is “racist”

I’d like to express my feeling about the East Coast Radio’s race equality. I think I’ve fully proved that this is a racist radio station. This comes after I entered their competition sponsored by Budget Insurance in two seasons and I never won even a single prize.
Listeners were requested to enter the Budget Bill Blast competition by registering their bills online. After registering, listeners were requested to listen to its weekly morning show between 06h30 and 08h30 to see if they are the winners.
I entered this competition in its first season last year. I kept on listening and I never won. Only Indians and white listeners were chosen daily until the competition closed. This year I entered again, telling myself they are going to pick my name. But it’s the same old fashion from last season as they keep choosing Indians and whites only.
If we all entered the competition, the show’s producers must at least choose one listener from each race group to maintain race equality.
EVERTON MFITSHI
Shayamoya

ECR promotions manager Jonathan Lumley replies:
East Coast Radio has never, and will never discriminate on the basis of race in anything we do. The suggestion that we only choose winners from a certain demographic is factually incorrect. If the sender of this letter had been listening to our station properly, they would realise that we award prizes to every race, sex, and virtually every age group in our broadcast footprint, in every competition we run, and we have the winners’ details to prove this.
We also checked to see if the name Everton Mfisthi had entered the competition in question, and were surprised to note that the name is not the registered name online (we have supplied these details to The Courier in confidence to verify the details). In addition the entry would be null and void as the required fields we have asked to be supplied to us, have not been filled in correctly and the bill amount left blank. This would constitute an invalid entry and would not be considered if pulled randomly from our entrants. And the entry would again be discarded when it come to the verification process to check that the winner is not committing fraud or misleading us. We hope this clarifies this matter.