Podcast Listening Challenge Week 7: Pod Save Africa Podcast
This week I visited the Lutcha website and I bumped into a podcast with an interesting name. Pod Save Africa is a cool name and it reminds me of another podcast that I will listen to called Pod Save America. Americans are very inventive with names so this was a nice play on words to see. Just like Pod Save America, this Podcast takes a political view on things within the continent. I also believe the podcast has a great chance to flourish because African political stories can be so crazy that its almost unbelievable.
What I like about this Podcast is that they have a website to make them look for professional for sponsors. I would also like to see them on all the other mediums like IG and Youtube because the audience consumes content on any chosen platform on any given day.
The Coronavirus is currently dominating our lives so I wanted to avoid a podcast about the virus because it has been covered ad nauseam. I picked the episode titled Will The Real Mr. President Please Stand Up. This episode included the story of Guinea Bissau and the fact that it currently has 2 presidents and 2 prime ministers. I mean only in Africa right!!
I pressed play and they introduced themselves and then the pod began. They began to address the Corona virus and I was deeply disheartened. The first 15 minutes of this episode was dedicated to this topic and they were teaching me how to properly wash my hands. This is a drag if there is no video because this is primarily taught via visual means and the episode had a run time of 42 minutes. This left 27 minutes to actually POD.
After that they became talking about African political stories and they spoke about Guinea having two presidents and two Prime Ministers. I did not know that Guinea has a coup almost every 4 years which is a crazy stat. This was good information but they did not do a deep dive on everything that happens in Guinea and their thoughts on this. Time may have been a factor as well.
They next spoke about the death of Hosni Mubarak at the age of 91. He was the former president of Egypt and considered a dictator like my uncle Bob Mugabe. They reported this information like the news and just gave out the information. That’s all good for a news channel or for radio but I would have preferred to hear the hosts give their opinions on Mubarak especially as they are not from Egypt. The view from an outsider is interesting to hear. Maybe this is how the podcast is conducted and as a first time listener the episode dragged and did not create any interest.
For this podcast I really hope they can narrow down their focus because Africa is a huge continent, or they can extend the length of their episodes in order to cover everything. They should also inject more of their own opinion because that’s kind of what we expect from a podcast. They are on to something but right now they still some distance from where they could be. I intend to listen to Pod Save America and see how big the gulf between the two products is.
Till next week’s Podcast, you can read about last week’s podcast here: Week Six (Stuff You Should Know Podcast)
