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IN the past two weeks we have run a number of stories in this newspaper, just showing what exactly is wrong with our football, our national game that we all love with a lot of passion.

Once again, our Warriors are not in action at the Nations Cup finals and their fans have, for the umpteenth time, been forced to adopt other national teams, as if they don’t have their own team to support in the titanic battle for honours unfolding in Equatorial Guinea.

It has been the same story, for the past nine years, after our Warriors last appeared at the 2006 Nations Cup finals in Egypt and, frighteningly, we were so horrible, in the qualifiers for the current tournament, we crashed out in the first round of the preliminary stage to Tanzania.

Rather than improving, we are actually losing our way as a football nation and, our graph, in the past five years shows that we are becoming a hopelessly insignificant lightweight in this game and drifting far away from the company, of the big boys, which we enjoyed at the 2004 and 2006 Nations Cup finals.

Our alarming decline has coincided with the arrival of Cuthbert Dube as the ZIFA president, in March 2010, and how he has failed to provide the leadership direction that he promised when he was campaigning to be our national football leader.

It’s a fact that the Warriors are a poorer brand today, than they were in February 2010, just before Dube took over, they are a weaker football team today, than they were in March 2010, and such is the madness, we don’t even know who is our head coach, five months after Ian Gorowa resigned and just another four months before the 2017 Nations Cup qualifiers get underway.

ZIFA, as an organisation, are not any better, and the association finds itself weighed down by a mountain of debt, ranging between US$4 million to US$6 million, depending on which ZIFA spin-doctors one wants to listen to and that it was US$600 000 in the red when Dube took over, hasn’t escaped the scrutiny of his critics.

The firm that audited the ZIFA books found out that more than US$700 000 could not be accounted for, but instead of this being the wake-up call that our football leaders needed to put their house in order, they decided to bury this anomaly in foolish explanations, which are an insult to the manual used to run public organisations like our football governing body, to deceive the public.

But our stories, in the past few weeks, have shown that there is a sickening culture at ZIFA where accountability is non-existent, our coaches are routinely ripped off in the name of improving their qualifications,by an association that forces them to pay more for the CAF badges than any other country on the continent.

Refreshingly, the Government appears to have had enough of the nonsense at ZIFA and the rampant mismanagement of a national public organisation and Sport, Arts and Culture Deputy Minister, Thabitha Kanengoni-Malinga, told Parliament on Wednesday that the game’s leadership, especially its president Cuthbert Dube, has to be removed for the sport to be plucked from the quagmire.

Kanengoni-Malinga was cheered by parliamentarians, drawn from across our political divide, when she said that the Government had reached a point where it was ready for the country to suffer possible sanctions from Fifa, for dissolving the Zifa board, for the sake of bringing sanity in the way the nation’s biggest sporting discipline was being managed.

There is no doubt that Dube, working in tandem with his chief executive Jonathan Mashingaidze, has failed miserably to drive our national game forward and reports that he doesn’t even care to watch the game itself, only attending one Warriors’ game – an international friendly against Brazil in 2010 – in his five-year term as ZIFA boss, shows that he isn’t the right leader for this massive job.

We believe Dube should simply concede that he has failed, after all he hasn’t met any of the targets that he promised when he was campaigning for the ZIFA job five years ago, and he should do the honourable thing by resigning and that will ensure a smooth transition, into a new era.

By taking a stubborn stance and refusing to quit, Dube will just be feeding into the anger that is growing among his army of critics, who are justified in demanding that he steps down, and we believe he doesn’t want to be remembered as the ZIFA boss who forced our country’s suspension from Fifa simply because he was refusing to do the honourable thing by leaving a job where his ratings have plummeted.

The ball is in Dube’s court and his advisers should be telling him that, as they say in this sport, it’s game over.