The Sunday News
Nkosilesisa Ncube, Sunday Life Reporter
NHIMBE Trust has become the latest social pariah; following a Facebook post in which the trust announced that none of the plays submitted to it by the public had been successful.
“We would like to thank all who responded to our call for plays earlier this year. However, none of the entries were successful.
We will open another call for plays in 2017,” read the trust’s post.
Almost instantly, disgruntled comments from the public started pouring in, questioning the grounds on which the plays had been rejected.
“I feel this announcement by Nhimbe Trust is irresponsible,” read one comment while others who shared the same sentiments responded likewise.
“Irresponsible is an understatement, this is total misrepresentation of facts that they are no creatives in Zimbabwe. I totally disagree, thank God I did not submit otherwise this would have been the highest humiliation in my fast growing career as a writer,” concurred another commenter.
Nhimbe Trust did not respond to any of the comments neither did the trust give any reason as to why none of the plays were accepted.
Contacted for comment, Nhimbe Trust communications manager Ronald Moyo said that the plays were not rejected out of ill intention.
“It is not to say that all the submissions were bad, but there was a certain element that we were looking for that we just did not find in the submitted entries. There is a theme that we were going with and the submitted entries were not in accordance with that,” Moyo said.
The competition had been centred on how the women’s movement can respond to the political situation in the country and the playwrights were meant to write in this theme.
Another representative from Nhimbe, however, said that they had only received 15 entries and none of the entries were up to the standard that they expected.
Joshua Nyapimbi, the trust’s director said, “We always have a certain standard that we expect from our entrants and we cannot afford to drop that standard. We cannot compromise on the quality of our productions. We simply did not find what we were looking for,” he said.
In a statement released by Nhimbe earlier this year, they had said that the plays would be judged based on the response to the call, cohesiveness of the issues tackled and the compelling execution of writing skills.
The winners of the competition were to be announced on 14 October.
Had there been a winner for the competition, they would have walked away with a cash prize of lliams $750 and the winning play would have been directed by a female director.
Hopeful playwrights will have to wait for next year as Nyapimbi said they would be calling again for submissions.
@nkocykay
