Wachambuzi republic vs reality: Featuring Mfanyakazi Sports Editor James Nhende

DAR ES SALAAM: LAST Friday, I found myself seated in a conference hall at Mnazi Mmoja Hospital in Dar es Salaam, at a seminar organised by TASWA – the Tanzania Sports Journalists Association. Now, whenever journalists gather in a room, two things are guaranteed.

First, everyone arrives with opinions. Second, very few leave with less of them. But on this particular afternoon, something unusual happened. James Nhende spoke. Normally he only writes. Today was an exception. And, quite impressively, he did not stop. He went on to give us food for thought all afternoon – lots of it… Yes! You heard the name right. James Nhende The James Nhende – former sports editor of the legendary Mfanyakazi weekly, a publication that, in its time, was less a newspaper and more of an institution.

To call Mfanyakazi a “paper” is rather like calling a lion a “cat.” Technically correct, but deeply inadequate. In its heyday, Mfanyakazi did not simply report sport. It shaped it.

It argued it. It remembered it. If today’s WhatsApp groups buzz endlessly with opinions, if Instagram pages drip with commentary, if TikTok analysts deliver dramatic verdicts with the confidence of prophets and if FM radio hosts can dissect football for four straight hours without encountering a single verified fact, then Mfanyakazi was all of that – but with one crucial difference.

It had discipline. And at the centre of that discipline sat James Nhende. Not shouting. Not performing. Not chasing attention. Simply writing. Editing. Carefully. Relentlessly. Thoughtfully. A gatekeeper in the truest sense of the word. And, as he demonstrated last Friday, a man burdened. No…! blessed, with photographic memory. “Trying to report without memory,” he said calmly, “is like driving a car without a rear-view mirror.” But Nhende was not talking about traffic.

He was talking about direction. And, more importantly, about the quiet danger of moving forward without understanding what lies behind. Because once you remove memory from journalism, something peculiar happens. Analysis begins to collapse into performance. Which brings us, gently but inevitably, to the modern republic of Wachambuzi. Ah yes.

The citizens of that great, noisy nation that has annexed our airwaves, occupied our studios and declared a permanent state of confident opinion. These are men and occasionally women who speak with such authority that you would assume they have coached every team, studied every match and possibly invented football during their spare time. “This is the greatest Yanga side in history!” one announces, voice swelling like a national anthem. And you listen. You nod. You almost believe.

Until, of course, you remember that history itself has not been consulted. No reference to past squads. No comparison with earlier eras. No statistical grounding. Just passion fresh, loud and entirely unsupported. It is a bit like declaring your neighbour’s pilau the finest in East Africa without ever leaving your street. Enthusiastic, yes. Accurate, not necessarily.

And this is where Nhende’s point begins to sting. Without memory, analysis becomes guesswork. And guesswork, when delivered with sufficient confidence, acquires a dangerous quality it begins to sound like truth. Take the Kariakoo derby. Now here is a fixture that is not merely played; it is inherited.

A multi-generational argument disguised as a football match. Grandfathers debate it. Fathers reinterpret it. Sons remix it on social media. It is history in motion. And yet, listen carefully to how it is sometimes discussed today. You will hear excitement. Plenty of it. You will hear predictions, emotions, declarations. But what you will often not hear is memory. No references to past encounters.

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No recalling of dramatic comebacks. No honouring of players who carried entire seasons on their backs like unpaid labourers in the service of glory. Remove those and what remains is not analysis. It is noise. Very confident noise, but noise nonetheless. The same pattern repeats itself with Taifa Stars. Every few months, a new verdict arrives. “We are improving.” “We are declining.” “This is a golden generation.” All very convincing. All very quotable. But ask a simple question – “based on what?” – and the room suddenly becomes a little quieter. Because without historical anchoring, these are not conclusions.

They are reactions. And reaction, however passionate, is not journalism. It is reflex. Meanwhile, sports programming has grown into something quite extraordinary. Hours upon hours of discussion. Panels that resemble family meetings where nobody agrees but everyone insists. Call-in segments where every opinion is welcome and every pause is strictly prohibited.

It is lively. It is engaging. It is, at times, unintentionally hilarious. But for all its energy, one begins to notice a small but persistent absence. Substance. Because time, as Nhende’s presence gently reminded us, does not create depth. You can speak for three hours and still say nothing new. Length is not insight. Volume is not knowledge.

And when conversation becomes stretched without being strengthened, it turns into something else entirely. Processed thinking. Now, processed food we understand. It looks appealing, tastes convincing and leaves you wondering later what exactly you consumed. Processed analysis works much the same way.

At this point, one must look, not angrily, but honestly, at the gatekeepers. Editors. Producers. Station managers. The quiet architects of what reaches the public. Are they listening closely enough? Are they rewarding preparation, or merely performance?

Are they encouraging depth, or simply filling airtime? Because a system that rewards noise will always produce more of it. And such a system does not collapse dramatically. It fades. Slowly. Politely. Almost invisibly. Until one day, you realise that what you have been consuming is no longer quite journalism. It is something else. Something that sounds right, feels right, but rests on very little.

And yet and this is important, the tools for doing better are everywhere. We live in an age of abundance. Archives exist. Statistics are available. Historical footage is waiting patiently to be revisited. The problem is not access. It is discipline. The discipline to prepare before speaking. The discipline to verify before declaring.

The discipline to pause and ask the most uncomfortable question of all: Do I actually know this, or am I simply saying it? Because professionalism is not defined by the possession of a microphone. It is defined by what you do with it. Now, to be fair, fans are allowed their excesses.

In fact, they are encouraged. Football without exaggeration would be like chai without sugar, technically complete, but emotionally unsatisfying. Fans can shout. They can rewrite history every weekend. They can declare their team the greatest in the universe and defend that claim with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. It is part of the charm. But analysts. The Wachambuzi.

They are meant to do something different. They are meant to bring clarity. And when that line begins to blur, when the analyst becomes indistinguishable from the fan, something quietly important is lost. The conversation stops moving forward. It begins to circle. And that, more than anything, is how standards slip.

Which is why, as I sat there last Friday, watching James Nhende calmly dismantle our collective bad habits without raising his voice even once, I realised something rather uncomfortable. He had not come to criticise. He had come to remind. To remind us that journalism has a spine.

That memory is not optional. That credibility is built slowly and lost quickly. And that, in a world increasingly filled with noise, the most powerful thing a journalist can still do…is at least know what they are talking about.