Pretoria - The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) will in future work with the South African Football Association (SAFA) to ensure it gets the necessary rights well ahead of time to broadcast the national team's away games.
This comes after the SABC failed to televise the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) qualifier match between Bafana Bafana and Sierra Leone, played in Freetown on Sunday.
While the public broadcaster had received the rights to broadcast the match on Friday afternoon, their crew was grounded in Ivory Coast with their live transmitters - leaving South Africans unable to watch the match. The SABC said this was due to bad weather.
On Tuesday, SAFA President Kirsten Nematandani convened a meeting with the SABC's acting Group Chief Executive Robin Nicholson to discuss the SABC's failure to broadcast the Bafana match.
During the meeting, the late acquisition of rights and a lack of broadcast partners with production capacity were cited as the main reasons that led to the match not being televised on its TV and radio platforms.
The two have agreed that they will need to work together to ensure that rights are secured in time for games that are outside South Africa. There must also be a joint pre-inspection team prior to both local and away matches and prior to the games and there must be an advanced team that will profile the country that the match will be played at.
Nematandani and Nicholson also agreed that the audience will be informed in time as to whether the match will be broadcasted or not.
The SABC has also agreed to structure a relationship with a production entity with broadcast capability to produce matches in the West African region.
The executive teams from both parties will meet on a continuous basis to review operations and to monitor the progress on the issues agreed upon. They will meet every fortnight as another way of strengthening their communications.
Both organisations again apologised to the South African public affected by the non-broadcast of the match.
