and ordinary communities at peace with themselves.
Watching all those lively crops, the unpolluted rivers of life pregnant with fresh waters, the dense forests brimming with wildlife, carefree monkeys playing on the roadside and seeing all that green grass of home, always made the trips something to look forward to. This was home, where I really belonged, and these ordinary communities of farm workers and mine workers were my people, and for 20 years, I had lived their simple lives.
The big city didn’t feel like home and there were days, and nights, when I felt so lonely I was so sure I would bring this to an end the following day, pack my bags and retreat back to Chakari, where the heart was. What I kept detecting, even in those early stages, was the immense pride that these simple folks derived from the fact that one of them, the son of that poor mine worker from House Number 82 in the M4 Section of Dalny Mine in Chakari, was swimming in unchartered waters.
For them, just seeing my name in the national newspaper, writing about football and dining with its stars, some of whom they would never see in their life-time, was a monumental success story for a simple community that probably had all along believed that such heights were beyond their limits to scale. They had seen some of their poor folks, in the past, rise from the humble community to make names for themselves, especially in football, as players who became so good they played for the national team and became household names.
Victor Mapanda was the first in the ‘70s, a free-scoring big striker who moved to Rio Tinto to make his name, before David Mwanza exploded, just after Independence, and used the same football fields of Chemkute, the home of Rio, to become one of the greatest midfielders of his generation. But football players could always emerge from anywhere, and the best had come from such poor communities like ours, and so while the folks back home derived a lot of pride in Mapanda and Chikwama, it wasn’t something that shook our community.
After all, there was a feeling, within that community, that far more gifted players, like Mutambarika Chirwa, David “Gwejegweje” Phiri, Partson Muzhuzha, Aidan Sweet, Crispen “Dhumbe” Phiri, Astood Zulu and Langton Penyani, had come out of the same compounds but, unfortunately, didn’t get a lucky break to showcase their talent.
Writing for a national newspaper on issues related to a sport that was very close to their hearts, being seen as an authority, even in those early days, was something different, something refreshing and, before I had known it, I was the new golden boy of the community. I have kept close links with Chakari and its people, in the past 20 years that I have developed from being that rookie fresh-faced reporter into a very senior member of the local sports writing fraternity. Nowhere in this country was the story of my banishment, from all football-related activities by Zifa, on the basis that I had been found guilty of match-fixing and illegal betting, received with universal shock, and sadness, like what happened in Chakari on Black Friday last week.
No town shed tears for me, on that Black Friday, like what the simple people of Chakari, united by both pain and shock by what had happened 140 km away in Harare, did on that unforgettable day. No, this can’t happen to us, they said, surely not to us, people of simple lives and ordinary lifestyles, not to us, who lost David Mwanza when death swept him away when he was still young, not to us, who have lost Falcon Gold somewhere in the backwaters of the lower leagues.
Not to us, certainly not at this moment, when a ray of light had just filtered through the dark cloud that had hovered over our town for so long, with Dalny Mine fully operational again and hundreds of our young men back at work and our little town feeling good once more. Surely not now, when just two months ago, the entire community had celebrated when Falcon Gold Zimbabwe Ltd, the company whose bursaries had helped our generation pursue education beyond O’ Level, was voted the “Best Performing Mining Company” on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange in 2011.
After all, in winning that award, our company had distinguished itself in “corporate governance, investor relations and management quality,” and the entire community had felt honoured to hear Ian Saunders, the executive chairman, say the award was a testimony of the contribution of the company’s workforce.
“It is an honour for Falcon Gold to win such an award, as well as a tribute to the hard work of our employees over the past two years,” Saunders said, and they all felt proud to read this in The Herald, where that boy from House Number 82 M4 Section, one of their sons and a beneficiary of the company’s scholarship programmes back in the ‘80s, also worked.
Not now, when even the road that connects us with Kadoma, had been rehabilitated, the old mine clinic was back in operation and somebody was even reviving Falcon Gold, our football club better known as Bwera Ufe (Come and Die) in the compounds.
It was like watching Lloyd Webber’s ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’, that musical about Eva Peron, also known as Evita, who made a big impression on the lives of the people of Argentina, as the First Lady, before plunging them into mourning when she died of cancer at the young age of 33.
These were my people, my community, asking themselves a lot of questions, and finding very few answers in return, and alone, far away from the big cities, tucked away in their little human settlement that is represented by a very small dot on the country’s map, they endured their pain.
And so did I, and so did my pastor Richard of Jesus Is The Way Ministries, my good friend Obert Masvotore, my colleague Milton Nyamadzawo, my brother Ferro Chareka, my Facebook friends Gondai Mazhuwa, Lazzie Hacha and Nodumo Nyathi, my workmates, my neighbours, you name them.
I know they all want me to go to considerable lengths to say my side of the story, to answer some of the questions that are haunting their minds, to shed some light on the darkness that filtered through their world, to give a meaning to all this. They are not walking alone, because that’s the same story with my folks back home in Chakari, but as much as I would like to talk about it, say something about it, I’m sorry that I can’t do it now because my superiors here feel the time isn’t right to do that.
The lawyers, too, feel it’s premature to do that and, during such sensitive times, only a fool will not take the recommendations of his legal counsel and, as much as I know that there will be many disappointed people today that I can’t discuss that ‘ban’ slapped on me, all I can do is to beg for your understanding. It has never happened before in this world, you know, a journalist being banned from football for life in this world by his national association, and so when you break virgin territory, as we have done in this case, it’s important to take every step with caution.
There is a danger that in anger you end up losing your focus and by opening your mouth, to let loose, you end up making a lot of monumental blunders that are not necessary at this sensitive period of this case which gave Chakari its own version of Black Friday.
I have never masqueraded as the next Pope, which means I have a lot of flaws as a human being, but those who know me closely know that I’m just a simple guy from Chakari, who loves his Manchester United and tries to work hard for my little family, who look to me as daddy and not as a Senior Sports Editor.
Time, as it usually does, is the best judge and I hope my good people of Chakari, when the clock that keeps time on my service on this company reaches the 20th year landmark on Thursday, will have cause to celebrate. Not because I have been here and done that but because a light would have shone through the darkness that enveloped their world on Black Friday and, bit by bit, they will be getting more answers to the questions that have been weighing down on their conscience this week.

The Heartbreak Of Luanda
The people of Chakari, just like everyone else who loves football in this country, have had a week to forget because, even before they were hit by the bombshell of having their own dragged into the mud, they had been shattered by what had happened in Luanda. Even for a country that knows, probably better than any other nation, the pain that comes with falling at the final hurdle, our failure in Luanda hit us so hard it felt like we were experiencing it for the first time.
We should be that nation that no longer feels the pain, when it comes to crashing at the last hurdle, because it’s something we have done with frustrating regularity. You would feel, because we have been pummeled so much, our spirits have been shattered so much, our hearts have been broken so much, our soul has been hammered so much, by now we have developed a way of absorbing all the pain that comes with such failure.
That we have qualified just for two Nations Cup finals, in 32 years, at an average rate of one Nations Cup appearance every 16 years, tells the damning story of our chronic shortcomings when it comes to our battles to make an appearance at this football festival. That it took us a good 23 years, to finally break our Nations Cup appearance virginity, tells its own story and, because it was us, we had to wait a good 24 hours for the result from Gabon before we could, finally, celebrate making it to the grand show.
But, having gone through all that, having suffered all that, the failure in Luanda felt so different, felt so painful, felt so strange, felt so confusing, felt like we were experiencing it for the first time and, in that web of intricate pain, we suffered.
Why Always Us?
For every Angolan face you saw celebrating inside the November 11 Stadium on Sunday, there were about 10 000 Zimbabweans nursing broken hearts and battling psychological demons as they wondered why it always have to be us all the time.

When You Have The Ball In Your Court
Well, for the first time, in 32 years of competing in the trenches of African football, we found ourselves in a unique position where even in defeat, in our final game, we would still go through to the Nations Cup finals. It’s the kind of luxury that we had never known, never felt, never experienced, never blown away, and that tended to fuel all the optimism that this was our moment and we had to seize it with both hands.
When we played Congo we needed to win that match and all we could do was to draw it and, with the late second goal scored by the Central Africans, our chance for a maiden appearance at the ’92 Nations Cup finals was blown. When we played Zambia in that final qualifier, we also needed to win that game, and with that late equaliser scored by Kalusha, our chances of a place at the ’94 Nations Cup finals were blown away.
When we played Angola in that final qualifier, we also need to win that game for us to go to the ’98 Nations Cup finals in Burkina Faso, but we lost that encounter 1-2 and it could have been so different if Adam Ndlovu had scored a hat-trick and not just the single goal he got that day. For once, we were in control of our destiny as even in defeat, even by a two-goal margin as long as we scored twice in reply, we could have gone to the Nations Cup in South Africa.
We had this huge advantage that even if Angola raced to a 4-0 lead in the first half in Luanda, the match would still be alive because all that we needed was to get two goals in the second half and, before they knew it, we were on our way to South Africa. We couldn’t have asked for more and, crucially, we weren’t playing those West or North African teams who will make sure the playing field isn’t level, who will play all sorts of funny games with the referees and who will subject our players to all sorts of humiliation to wear them down.
We were playing Angola, for goodness sake, a team that we had dismantled 3-1 in the first game at Rufaro, a team that was going through a transition phase as it adjusts to the post-Akwa era, a team that was competitive but not special in any way, a team that we have played again and again.
We were not playing Cote d’Ivoire but the Palancas Negras, whose star player Manucho turned into a misfit at Manchester United before resurfacing at modest La Liga side Valladolid and, if that’s the best they could offer, then they were at par with us because our best player, Knowledge Musona, also played at a modest Bundesliga side.
We were not playing Ghana but Angola whose other main player was an old-fashioned winger, Djalma, who is one dimensional, and after signing for Porto has spent the last two years being loaned to some small teams, including his present modest club in Turkey.
The only problem was that our main guy, who attacks from the right for the Warriors, and now plays his football in Belgium, Ovidy Karuru, was frozen out of the system because the coach Rahman Gumbo was still unhappy that he passed responsibility when he had a good chance in Mozambique.
Just as well, they were not teammates because, as Rahman put in on record, he would have “killed him.” The ball, for a change, was in our courts and we had all the aces and jokers in our pack.
This was our Magwitch moment, as in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, when six-year-old orphan, Philip Pirrip, meets the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, in the village churchyard, in a defining moment that would change his life forever.
“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer, or more explicit, than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip,” he introduces us to his incredible story in Great Expectations.
And, just like Pip who was six when he met the man who would be his benefactor and change his life, the striking similarity to our story was that it had also been six years when we last played at the last Nations Cup finals.

Rahman’s Cocktail Of Shortcomings
Rahman lost his plot, in the month between that win at Rufaro and the game in Luanda, because, like Muhamad Ali, he suddenly believed he could sting like a bee and float like a butterfly. He lost the plot his game plan when the referee blew to end the first half at Rufaro and, surprised to find himself in a 3-0 lead, our coach found all this too good to be true.
While his counterpart, Gustavo Ferrin, used that half-time break to switch to Plan B, and bring in Manucho and Djalma and shift his attack to concentrate on the right channel where we were at our weakest defensively, because of the lack of pace, Rahman toasted victory when there were still three more quarters of this battle to be played.
While Angola emerged from the half-time break as a rejuvenated team, even when the scoreline consistently reminded them of the gap that had been created between them and their hosts, our boys came out of the break looking like a side that had spent the last 15 minutes drinking Zed.
In football they say the best coaches are seen by the way they influence change, in their teams when things haven’t gone according to plan, in the second half. Ferrin, beaten all systems out in the first half, emerged triumphant and was rewarded by that killer away goal that changed all the dynamics and, not surprisingly, it was manufactured down that right channel of our defence.
That we were going to have a huge crisis, in as far as goalkeeping was concerned, was known the moment Tapuwa Kapini went under the knife, a good one month before we played Angola. Any serious coach, given the sensitivity of that position, would have settled for his man there and then and told Arial Sibanda well in advance that, barring any injuries, he will be the one keeping goals in Luanda. By doing so we would have given the young man enough time to prepare himself psychologically for the mission and he would have plunged into battle in a better frame of mind.
But what did we do?
We brought in five more goalkeepers and turned it into a cocktail of confusion so much that we wiped out what little confidence, Arial had, and we fielded five-attack minded players in a game where defence would have won the game for us. In just six minutes, our advantage had been wiped away and the coach, who was somehow entrusted into the job when the majority of this nation doubted his capacity, when FC Platinum told us he was no longer good enough, hasn’t been seen anywhere to explain the disaster.
Having conceded two goals in Burundi, Rahman conceded another two goals in Luanda which, on a scale of probability, means that this is his standard. The sad thing is that noone, it appears, wants to talk about how we could fail, when presented with just two teams to beat and qualify, and in the aftermath of Luanda, there is deafening silence and my poor folks in Chakari, still reeling from their Black Friday, have been asking questions about Angola but getting very few answers.
Maybe, just maybe, Dynamos and Highlanders will give this country a football game to cheer its spirits after weeks of endless negativity that have turned the game’s landscape into dangerous territory.

To God Be The Glory!
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

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