ZNBC fails to broadcast Chipolopolo match

In the early hours of Saturday, avid Chipolopolo fans stayed up to watch their team play Japan in a friendly, held in the United States. They had been promised full coverage of the game, which is one of the last before the Japanese side head to the World Cup in Brazil. But when the whistle was blown to begin the game, there were no fans from Zambia watching on ZNBC.

This is not the first time that Zambian football fans have been let down. Due to many reasons, Zambian fans have been unable to watch multiple away games because of failures due to many Zambian media sources. What is worse yet, many of the companies who promise to provide coverage and fail, leave their fans in the open, instead of providing them with other information opportunities.

Chipolopolo fans took to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to express their concern. There were even calls on the official FAZ Facebook for the group Boko Haram to do something about the poor signal, followed by the hashtag #bringbackourgirls in comments. There was also a swarm of comments on the MY ZNBC Facebook page too, with fans complaining about poor signal and lack of coverage. These comments were further followed on Twitter where fans who were in the dark about information, tried to find an answer.

In desperation, my fans turned to online websites to watch the match. Others decided to look to their social media accounts. Many of these small-run accounts did a better job of providing information than the large corporations that failed. Even the FAZ official Twitter did not start minute-to-minute updates until near the second half.

Let us know your thoughts on the poor coverage that Zambians receive when trying to support their home team.

Don’t forget that LusakaVoice.com always follows through on our promises to cover games, and we do our best to keep our readers alerted as much as we can.