ZBC should give women a chance in sport!

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The Warriors, Zimbabwe’s national men’s soccer team, failed to progress past the group stages of the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon, displaying a lack of technical ability and talent.

Zimbabweans expected a better performance from the team on the third time of asking, having failed to reach the quarter finals on two previous attempts in 2004 and 2006, but the warriors were consistent in mediocrity.

I will let football pundits criticise the team’s on-pitch display and focus on the failures of the national broadcaster, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), in their coverage of the tournament.

There seemed to be attempts to expand the pool of analysts by ZBC and like the warriors supporters, I had high expectations of the broadcasters – again like the warriors supporters, I was disappointed.

The first question which came to my mid was where is the female voice? After sending a women’s team to both the Olympics and African Cup could ZBC fail to find a female analyst for this tourney?

In this respect Star Fm provides an example, in Yvonne Mangunda, that women can spice up football analysis. But ZBC stuck with their now monotonous presenters reciting cliché phrases.

After the warriors stalemate with Algeria, I complained to a group of friends that the ZBC was celebrating mediocrity by praising a team which failed to win a match they dominated to which one friend quckly noted that I was even more mediocre for watching ZBC. Indeed there is a lot of truth in that response but there are many without any option and have to watch Denford Mutashu comment on everything from bond notes to football.

ZBC has perfected the art of sticking to the same analysts and pundits with identical opinions such that it cannot rock the boat and include female voices lest they deviate from the norm.

Many people want to feel the ambience of tournaments, a feeling which can only be evoked by someone who has had similar experiences.  To do this, the ZBC did not have to look far as there is a pool of female players who battled it out for the country against Africa about a month ago.

Ambience aside, ZBC just has to stutter towards public service broadcasting by becoming an inclusive broadcaster at least with respect to gender dimensions.

However, the chauvinistic slant of the ZBC dries up the juice in the very few programmes one would not mind watching such that on any scale, the broadcaster has only one rating – boring!

Yes, a panel with consistency from veterans like lovemore Banda and Charles Mabika is  good, punditry from former soccer players like Alois Bunjira and Tonderai Ndiraya is better but ambience and diversity from immediate precedent tournament participants like the Mighty warriors would have been the best. - Society 24