SHARUKO TOPWHEN you are substituted to give way to someone like Eric Rosen, as was the case with me last week, there are no complaints whatsoever because you instantly appreciate that you are being replaced by a legend in the national game. And when someone like Rosen chooses this space as the one that provides the perfect platform for him to say goodbye to the football community, after more than a decade in which his money transformed Motor Action into the champions of Zimbabwe, you feel really humbled.

After all, this isn’t the only football blog in newspapers in this country where a dozen or so such weekly columns now dominate our ever expanding media landscape and for Rosen to design his farewell message, as a letter he wrote to me that was published on this blog last Saturday, was very humbling.

Only two years ago, his colleagues at zifa were frantically trying to silence me, giving themselves imperial powers that they didn’t have, and only assumed in their wild wet dreams, making questionable payments to people who were supposed to investigate their complaint, in a grand effort to cast me out of a game they now believed was their private property.

Now a man whose financial investment into running a Premiership football club had dwarfed just about everyone else, in terms of both longevity, success of the project and contribution to the national game, had found the wisdom to see beyond the curtains that their hate language had created and, in his moment of departure, reached out to me to provide a platform for him say goodbye to the nation.

Rosen painted a picture of a man who, at the end of his journey, was a very frustrated guy, certainly not at peace with himself, torn apart by the turmoil that he claimed was prevalent in the administrative structures of the Premiership, where he was a member of the leadership, and concerned about the demons he says were eating into the game’s conscience and leaving it short on integrity.

But, given the graphic nature of the alleged corporate transgressions that Rosen highlighted, one would have expected the leadership of the PSL to issue a statement saying his damning claims that “absolutely nothing has changed (in the PSL) apart from the rich pickings and the lavish life styles enjoyed by the privileged few in the Executive Committee and Secretariat while clubs and players wallow in poverty,” were certainly not true.

Surprisingly, for a public organisation that has a mandate to project a good image of itself to the sponsors who have kept company with them, despite questions about part of their conduct and whether it falls within the high expectations of such financial backers, the PSL decided silence was golden.

And, in the process, they sent a message that either what Rosen had raised was true, and they had absolutely no defence, it was pointless to stretch the debate any longer given the considerable damage that prolonging this argument would inflict or, simply, they didn’t care at all about everything that was said by a man who, only a month ago, was one of them.

But that can wait for another day.
Which leaves me to just say thanks to Eric for giving me a relief, which I guess I badly needed, even though there was considerable disappointment, among the regular readers of this blog who made sure that I get to know their frustrations through the various feedback platforms I have created, once they realised I had taken a sabbatical without due notice.

In an environment where bootlicking has been turned into an art, even in a media fraternity that has embraced public relations as a big part of its operational diet, where questioning has become taboo you seem to be living on a different planet when you start to question things, Rosen’s contribution last week was incredibly honest and refreshingly hard-hitting.

The problem is that Eric isn’t the first to say goodbye and, during his farewell, tell us that we are riding on a doomed ship which, like the Titanic, will inevitably smash into an iceberg and bring everything on board right into the ocean,

The more some things change, it appears, the more they stay the same.
Four years ago, just after assuming control of domestic football on the back of great expectations from a nation that believed he was the shining knight that the game had been waiting for to deliver it to the Promised Land, one of the first letters that Cuthbert Dube received was from Econet Wireless Zimbabwe chief executive, Douglas Mboweni.

Back then, this newspaper had launched a spirited campaign to try and entice Econet to return to the trenches of football sponsorship in this country, five years after the blue chip firm had unceremoniously cut its ties with the game, in a breakdown of a relationship that would leave the Premiership poorer and nursing its scars for years.

When they finally responded Mboweni, being a disciple of corporate ethics, wrote to Cuthbert Dube in his capacity as the new head of domestic football.

Econet’s Statement On Football In 2010
“We wish to offer our congratulations to you for your election to the position of Chairman of the zifa Board. Econet was once a sponsor of football in Zimbabwe through a sponsorship package for one of your affiliates, the Premier Soccer League.

“Unfortunately, we encountered what we considered TO BE DELIBERATE INTERFERENCE with the sponsorship, culminating in our Board being forced into making the decision to withdraw the sponsorship package.

“Upon withdrawal from the football sponsorship, our Board directed that the budget that had been earmarked for football sponsorship should be re-directed to funding social responsibility programmes and initiatives that cater for the less privileged in our society.

“Since our departure from football, the budget has been put to use funding programmes and initiatives, which include, but are not limited, to the following: The funding of Capernaum Trust’s activities Capernaum Trust is a wholly Econet funded Trust which provides school fees funding for orphans and other less privileged individuals.

“Econet ploughed in more than US$7 million in these activities in the last financial year alone and continues to invest more to try and address the needs of the less privileged in our societies.

“It is Econet’s belief that it would be morally reprehensible to re-allocate this budget back to football at the expense of the less privileged in our communities.

“Econet is at this stage simply unable to even consider when it would be financially feasible to sponsor football. We wish to thank you once again for the consideration and wish you success during your tenure at the helm of our football in Zimbabwe.”

Econet Statement On Football In 2014
Exactly two weeks ago Cuthbert Dube won a fresh mandate to be the zifa leader and, from the direct elections related to the board members, only two of his old team came back — John Phiri, who has done pretty nothing to justify why we were calling for former players to be included on the board, and Fungai Chihuri, a sober man with sober habits.

There have been pockets of protests from quarters who believe that the poll wasn’t done on a level playing field, with the extremely brave Eddie Chivero and his Zimbabwe National Soccer Supporters Association leading the way, while Sports Minister Andrew Langa says the poll didn’t pass the test to get the public seal of approval.

Some have said it was impossible to expect a bankrupt zifa, which needed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unsecured loans from their president’s company to pay for the holding of an assembly meeting, where all the councillors come to Harare at least twice a year, the cost of transport for them to come here, the cost of their accommodation and cost of their allowances, in the past four years, to then choose someone else in a race in which Dube was also a candidate.

Others have questioned the integrity of some of the councillors who voted in the poll, the influence that the loans that Dube’s company handed out to various structures of zifa, including the councillors in Masvingo whose annual meeting in 2012 was bankrolled by these funds, and his suitability to lead the association against a background of wild events that happened at his old workplace in recent months.

But for all the apparent shortcomings of a severely flawed system in which Dube will romp to another emphatic victory in 2018, irrespective of how the Warriors or the Young Warriors or the Mighty Warriors perform on the international stage between now and then, the reality that we have to live with is that we are stuck with him as the boss of the domestic game for the next four years.

Unless, of course, the Government intervenes and nullifies the polls, dissolves the leadership and assumes the consequences that will, inevitably, come with such a move, including the suspension of all our international assignments for quite some time.

Interestingly, just as was the case in 2010 when his first few weeks in office were greeted by a letter from Econet that would, unfortunately, set the tone for what would be a wild goose chase for sponsors by his Zifa leadership, Dube’s first two weeks in office after his re-election have also coincided with another huge announcement by Econet on their relationship with football.

“After our first experience in football, which was not very encouraging, we will not be venturing into soccer sponsorship,” Mboweni told lawmakers, who enquired if the company could come back and help football, during a visit to Econet’s offices on Thursday.

“I have gone to the board and requested if we are in a position to sponsor the sport but the board said we have other life-threatening issues to attend to than football.

“When I asked the board for the second time about the issue of sponsorship, they asked me ‘are we meeting the life-threatening demands in full?’ And, as long as those demands are there, we will not be sponsoring soccer.

“We are involved in other programmes like sending some children who need medical attention as far as India for treatment, so we have some pressing issues. Some other people will focus on that (football) and not us.”

Yes, Mboweni is right, but some feel that Econet are being just diplomatic because, after all, they are sponsoring the Victoria Falls Marathon that will be run on June 29 whose countdown adverts are even being flighted on Dstv.

The point is that the same issues that pushed Econet out of the game in 2005 are still there today, the same characters are still around, the same conditions, and we haven’t learnt anything really from that fallout and those who are running athletics can smile while we can only wonder what could have been if we were in this marriage.

Four years ago, when Econet made a similar statement in a letter sent to Dube, we didn’t look at it in its proper context because we were all euphoric that the new Zifa leadership, which we all believed in, would wave their magic wand and something great would emerge, some big companies, as they had promised us, would come on board.

Of course, nothing happened, no one came on board the Zifa train, and the company whose financial outlay in the Premiership made it their biggest investor, or sponsor depending on your choice of words, Mbada Diamonds, were beginning to ask some serious questions about the game, their relationship and its future.

Patience Khumalo’s Statement, In January 2014, On The State Of Our Football
“It’s a disaster. If I was CEO of any football entity I would resign. Because of the Mbada Cup, I have been thrown into football from a totally different perspective and straight into the Football Trust. No regrets on the decision I made because I’ve confirmed what is happening on the ground for myself.

“Can we tame it?
“We cannot tame it if we don’t have money, money is required to map the way forward. As we sit right now we have 10 provinces but if our football had a future in all these provinces then there would be adequate facilities for the development of the game.
“Because of the Mbada Cup I’ve found out the state of football at all levels and is a disaster the way we are going.

“Just finding a suitable ground from most of these provinces is a problem and, as we discovered with the Mbada Cup, some of the stadiums are like potato fields and everyone involved is aware of it. It means we’re not creating a potential future.
“As a Football Trust, if we are to be asked what have we done, what have we achieved? I can comfortably say NOTHING.
“To be appointed to the Trust it’s an honour that you’ve got brains but surely every week we discuss the same topic without results? It’s still there the Football Trust but we’ve stopped meeting. We are still discussing what we discussed in the first meeting because we’ve poor communication, poor co-ordination.

SHARUKO CENTER“For starts when you have the zifa CEO coming in to the Football Trust meeting, you would expect him to be the one who will drive it by telling us zifa’s plans so that we distribute tasks to different committees of the Trust.

“But if (1) he is not present or (2) he is not talking — literary not talking it becomes a big problem because the CEO is the one who should drive but you can’t get that out.

“I talk the most not because I know the most, I know the least and to me there is hope and I really think we can fix this.
“But then the others have already spoken about these things in the past, tried to do implement things and failed. So it’s nothing new. I blame everyone who has been in football for the mess we’re in right now and I blame the media guys.”

New Faces, Same Old Challenges, Same Old Broken System
With all the focus on Cuthbert Dube, it appears the country forgot that Ndumiso Gumede finally said goodbye to football administration, at the age of 67, and we will have a new vice-president, the likeable Omega Sibanda, when the board meets in Harare today.

Ben Gwarada, who comes in without a baggage and who showed his commitment to football by investing a substantial amount in Douglas Warriors a couple of years back, is also in the new team and so is Tavengwa Hara, a feisty lawyer from Bulawayo, whose track record in the game is very impressive from Njube Sundowns to Chicken Inn where he has enjoyed considerable success.

It’s unfair, really, that the arrival of these men on the main zifa board has been overshadowed, largely gone unnoticed, because of all the negativity that has stalked Cuthbert Dube’s re-election and, before doing anything, these guys have already been judged and condemned as a group that won’t take our game anywhere.

Of course, we don’t expect much from poor old JP because we didn’t see anything much from him in his first term.
But Hara is a man in his own right and not one to just go with things that are wrong, after all he is a lawyer with a reputation to protect, Ben has a company whose interests can be destroyed if he gets very bad publicity while OMz, the vice-president, promised to be a peace broker and heal the wounds.

All we can do is wait and see.
Maybe things change and, after all, it was interesting this week to hear Dube saying that he wants the cheapest PSL tickets to go for US$1, to try and bring the fans back to the stadiums, which was a monumental policy shift for the leader of an association that pegged the cheapest tickets, for the 2013 Nations Cup qualifier against Angola, at US$10, and even tried to justify such stupidity.

Barry Manandi, the co-host of the weekly Game Plan football show on ZTV every Monday night, said Dube has promised to talk to the nation, live on national television, on Monday and, maybe, he can begin the long but difficult task of charming a constituency that is largely allergic to his vision of taking the game forward.

With the broken system, epitomised by a zifa secretariat that will scoop a gold medal for the most inefficient FA office in world football, whose leader Jonathan Mashingaidze is more interested in cold wars and telling the board that the whole world is plotting to destroy them and without his support they are finished, I’m not sure how much we can improve, even if these new brooms have the capacity to sweep clean.

But you never know with football, the legendary Charles Mabika always tells us, and on the 25th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, where 96 Liverpool fans went to watch an FA Cup semi-final tie and never came back home to tell their story, wouldn’t it be nice for the Reds to win their first league championship in about a quarter of a century?

And if Liverpool can win the league championship, really, what stops us from hoping that, even with Mashingaidze still stuck in the trenches of an imaginary war in which the management of national football becomes a sideshow, something that irritates him, we could still do very well, in the next four years, and our Warriors can be a success story?

SHARUKO BOTTOMH-Metro said it will be four years of darkness.
That newspaper’s Editor, Lawrence Moyo, is a Liverpool fan, which means that he is a symbol of patience and optimism, something that his beloved team has taught him over the past 24 years, and for him to be so pessimistic, about where our national game is going, is very worrying.
To God Be The Glory!

Come on United !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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You can also interact with ROBSON SHARUKO on Facebook, Viber and on ZBC’s weekly television football magazine programme, GamePlan on Monday nights, or read his material in The Southern Times.

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